


it's these children's wars

by KatRoma



Series: of pinwheels and paper daffodils [11]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Alternate Universe of an Alternate Universe, F/M, Female Uchiha Sasuke, Gift Fic, God Do I Apologize Deeply For All of This
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-07 06:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4252881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatRoma/pseuds/KatRoma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anyone who claims Hogwarts is the safest place in Europe is a liar, or an idiot, and the school really does need a better security system. </p><p>(or, I discovered Harry and Sasuke have an almost startling number of similarities, and decided to do something about it)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nyaow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyaow/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Sofie! Fuck you for asking this!
> 
> Anyway, this was supposed to be yesterday, but my internet decided to hate me, so here it is. 
> 
> Also! With the exception of Uchiha, I changed all the last names to something you're more likely to find in Britain, because it's not like they can all be Japanese.
> 
> Edit: a new scene was added at the end.

The Scottish Highlands are white and silver, clear moonlight reflecting off the untouched snow that batters against the windows as the wind blows across the field. Though a fire burns hot and large and bright in the hearth of the parlor, the cold sneaks through the glass and doors as an unwanted guest. Sasuke Uchiha, age five with red nose and hair wet from melting snow, pulls the plaid blanket tighter around her shoulders as she attempts to ignore her discomfort, and focus on the words in front of her instead.

Today marks nearly a year and a half since her parents began teaching her to read, as early learning and quick intelligence are considered common marks of their family. Cunning and clever, every member in the five generations since they moved from Japan to Scotland have been either Slytherins or Ravenclaws, she learned when she barely old enough to understand what Hogwarts was. Now she’s old enough, but she still doesn’t understand what Itachi calls “house division.” What she knows is that it wouldn’t do to be something called a Hufflepuff, and, to a lesser degree, a Gryffindor. Why, she isn’t sure, but she thinks that the less sense the words make on the page in front of her, the less likely she is to be sorted into where she’s supposed to belong.

She rubs her eye, tired from concentration and the cold, and startles in her seat when someone takes the pen from her hand. It’s Itachi, not Mom or Dad, already wearing his pajamas with the dancing weasel that likes to run across his back. “I think that’s enough for today,” he says, clicking the pen and placing it down on the notebook. “You’re going to sleep before you write anymore B’s or D’s backwards.”

In the dining hall the room over, Mom and Uncle Mako laugh. Tomorrow is Christmas, and though their family doesn’t celebrate it, they use it as an excuse to meet every winter break. Itachi has dark circles under his eyes, too, like someone pressed with their fingers so hard they left marks. With a frown, Sasuke says, resistant, “But I don’t _want_ to, Itachi.”

He doesn’t give her a choice, picking her up under the arms like she does with their cat Miki, avoiding her wiggling feet. “It’s late, Sasuke,” he says as she frowns, leading her away from her homework and towards the stairs. “I’ll read to you if you want, but you only get one story.”

“But that’s not fair,” she says. “I was good.”

“You’re always good,” he says. She lays her head on his shoulder as they turn a corner, and listens to the sound of something creak. Though it’s been hours since the dinner, the whole house still smells of Grandma’s white chocolate chip cranberry cookies. “But I’m not going to be the one responsible when you aren’t up at nine tomorrow and miss saying goodbye to Shisui and Aunt Carol.”

As a second year at Hogwarts, Shisui has homework for winter holiday that’s more complicated than spelling and math. Aunt Carol is what Mom calls a “worrier,” and that Shisui procrasta-something, so he isn’t allowed to stay tomorrow. It’s disappointing, because Uncle Mako promised to enchanted snowballs for a fight in the morning and it’s always more fun with Shisui around. Itachi won’t invite their neighbor Kimmy, a pretty Muggle with hair dark as theirs and nails painted in the bright colors of hydrangea flowers found in their grandparents’ backyard, if there’s magic involved. Muggles learning about magic is illegal, which is one of the first things Sasuke ever learned.

Itachi, as a first year, is fortunate to have no holiday work at all.

The quilt on her bed is warm as she settles underneath it, Itachi tugging it to her chin. “What story do you want?” he asks as the door cracks open and Miki darts in, fluffy orange tail flouncing as she runs. Her eyes glow yellow in the dim light of the bedroom.

“‘Urashima,’” she answers. “Mom finished the Beetle book yesterday.”

Though their small family of four are Purebloods, they have enough Muggles married in with cousins or aunts or uncles to receive gifts of immobile illustrations, or for Itachi to be able to comfortably hold a conversation about recent films with the kids in town. When he first left for school in September, their parents told Itachi not to mention any of this, which she thinks probably means something not good. Maybe in Hufflepuff they wouldn’t care, but Hufflepuff isn’t good, either.

In her lap, Miki purs. Sasuke knows her cat will love her, at least, regardless of what happens six years from now.  

“‘Long ago,’” Itachi reads, “‘there lived a fisherman named Urashima. He lived at home with his mother, for he was unmarried. When she urged him to find a bride, he answered—’”

He steps abruptly, and Miki pauses in her licking. As Sasuke goes to ask what’s wrong, Itachi holds up his hand to quiet her, lips pressed together with his back tight, and then she notices, too.

From downstairs, they should be able to hear the low murmur of talking, or the creak of movement against their floors and rickety old chairs, but it’s silent. Even alone as just the four of them, there’s always some sort of noise, and Sasuke sits up in her own wariness, blanket sliding to her lap. If everyone left the house, the fire would still make a sound when the Flu power was thrown in, or the storm door would slam in the wind. More than that, no one would  ever leave Itachi and Sasuke alone at this time of night.

He reaches out, slowly and quietly, to slide the book on her end table and to switch off the light. The click is too loud as the room goes dark, illuminated only the glow coming from the wall lamps in hall. When he stands, shadow moving and eyes catching what little light there is, Miki hops off her lap, and dives underneath the bed.

“On my back,” he says quietly, hand closing around her upper arm as he pulls her up. “Don’t make a sound.”

Without question, and with her pulse jumping, she wraps her arms around his neck and legs around his waist. Years of hide and go seek with Shisui, and later her, too, means Itachi knows how to avoid the spaces of the floor that make noise. She grips at his shirt and tightens the hold of her legs, but they make it through the crack Miki left in the door without issue. As they turn the corner towards the rooms down the hall, she catches sight of the downstairs, still brightly lit and undisturbed. A curtain blows in the draft, ruffling the papers she left of the table, but then they’re away too quickly for her to see if her work flies away. Itachi walks as though he knows exactly what to do and where to go, which frightens her even more than silence.

Then the silence breaks with a bang and Mom’s scream, the sound ricocheting up the stairs and through the hall, followed by glass shattering. Sasuke bites her lip so hard to keep from screaming, too, that it hurts, and Itachi stumbles, losing his grip on her legs. As Shisui shouts for his father, Itachi makes it through his bedroom down, the commotion from downstairs disguising the noise of the hinges as they open.

She’s off his back in a moment, collapsing to his bed as he pulls his wand from his end table drawer. Doing magic outside of school is forbidden, but still he pushes close his door, and says so quietly she can barely hear, “ _Colloportus_.”

It locks with another click. His hands are shaking. Downstairs, an unfamiliar voice swears.

“Itachi,” she says as he moves to the window, “what’s going on?”

For a moment, he doesn’t answer, pushing first open the screen, then the shutters, letting in a gust of cold air that sinks right through her, and only making the sounds louder. Then he says, “I’ll tell you when we’re safe. Come here, we need to get to the tree.”

There’s an old holly tree growing outside Itachi’s window she climbed for the first time this summer before Mom yelled at her, and hasn’t since. When her brother holds out his hand for her, though, Sasuke accepts, allowing him to pull her forward and pick her up, balancing her bare feet against the window ledge. The holly branch is slick with ice and covered with snow, far from safe for two people wearing only pajamas. Leaning forward far enough to catch the area she needs to support her weight is difficult but not impossible, and her body goes numb the moment her feet touch the branch below. It’s hard, but she slides closer to the trunk, careful not the slip, and then uses it as support to land on the branch beneath her.

A new sound comes, one of spell cast on a lock, just as Itachi makes it to the branch, too. His face, already pale in the moonlight, goes white.

Someone’s above them, leaning over past the windowsill, but Itachi casts a second Locking Spell before the man can do anything, bringing the shutters solidly closed against his neck.

“Down, Sasuke,” he says, and she scrambles, her brother just a branch behind her.

They don’t make it. Close to the bottom, Mom comes tumbling out the back door, a man in black robes with her, flashes of light flying from the ends of their wands. Itachi slides past Sasuke, his own wand clutched between his teeth and eyes wide with his lips blue. She, foolish and five and useless, slips, falls, and pulls herself up to follow.

Mom falls flat, disappearing into the snow, as the man with hair so blonde it’s nearly white raises his wand.

As Dad appears suddenly in the open doorway, one hand pressed to his eye and side bleeding, Itachi calls out, “ _Expelliarmus_.”

It connects, the blonde’s wand flying out of his hand and green light going wide, but it’s the doorway Sasuke’s focused on. Another green light swishes from behind, silent, as Dad steps forward in snow. Slow but fast, he falls, tumbling forward like a pile of laundry dropped on the stairs across the frozen ground. He didn’t make a sound. His chest isn’t moving. Mom sits, shouting his name as Itachi does, and maybe even Sasuke, too, but another man is stepping over him, emerging from the silence of the house.

His eyes are yellow, and pupils slit like a snake’s.

Then, at once—Mom has her wand in hand, casting the same green spell at the man who killed Dad, as he side steps, and the blonde attempts to disarm Itachi, casting without words. He dodges, though, too, and Sasuke, young and directly behind him and numb with cold, doesn’t have the time to react.

The pain is nothing she’s ever felt before, lighting up her body as she collapses, losing awareness of her surroundings. It’s an all encompassing pain worse than when she fell from the sakura tree Grandma loves and broke her arm, or the time she fell off the bed and winded herself. She doesn’t noticed when it stops or if it stops, or how Itachi’s hands are on her, nails biting into her palm so harshly she bleeds.

She falls back into the world to her mother’s whine of pain, eyes finding her spread out in her yellow dress across the snow, facing towards them with her hair wrapped around her and blood spilling from her mouth every time she breathes. Voice jagged and fragile, filled with shards of ice, she says, “Don’t.”

Face blank, the snake man raises his wind again, pointed towards her chest.

“ _Avada Kedavra_.”

With a swish of green, she dies, and the Ministry men show up moments too late.

 

 

In two weeks following, Itachi and Sasuke first stay in the hospital, then with the Northrop family. Itachi, whether it’s his decision or someone else’s, isn’t going to attend Hogwarts for the spring semester. Minato and Kushina discuss adoption, because the Uchiha orphans have no other family, they think.

They shouldn’t have any other family, because no one ever talked about anyone else, but fourteen days after Sasuke saw her parents die, a man claiming to be their cousin Obito appears, offering to take them in. “Look, I wasn’t on the best terms with the rest of the family,” he says, “but they’re just a couple of a kids. I don’t want to leave them alone.”

Though Itachi and Sasuke beg to stay with the Northrop’s, and she knows Kushina and Minato try to negotiate something, too, family is considered more important than the desires of an eleven-and-five-year-old. By the end of the third week, Sasuke is hugging Naruto goodbye, afraid to lose anyone else in even a less literal sense, as she prepares to return to Japan for a month so her cousin can sort out their grandparents’ things. She’s been to Hokkaido twice that she can remember, but never in winter. At least Itachi is coming, she tries to tell herself, and doesn’t feel much braver for it.

He still hasn’t explained why he knew what to do.

“It was never your parents I had a problem with,” she hears Obito tell her brother during their single night stay in the Leaky Cauldron before they catch a portkey tomorrow. The room is wooden and chilly, lit only by a small, pinprick of light glowing from the tip of his wand. “My parents were Mako and Natsumi. You know, the more...traditional Purebloods. They weren’t that happy when I got sorted into Gryffindor.”

“They disowned you for that?”

There’s a pause, and the sound of cotton shifting against the scratchy fabric of the blanket. Obito says, “I got engaged to a Hufflepuff Muggleborn. Apparently it was totally fine for Uncle Daichi to marry an actual Muggle, but a Muggleborn Hufflepuff? Oh, the shame. Your parents didn’t care, I don’t think, but a falling out with one person is a falling out with everyone, you know?”

Again, they’re quiet. Sasuke lays still, listening.

“The Hat almost put me in Hufflepuff,” Itachi says, voice very small as though admitting it for the first time. “So I guess I didn’t panic for nothing.”

Obito sighs. “Get some sleep, kid,” he says. “We’re leaving for a different time zone in the morning.”

The bed shifts and the blanket moves as Itachi lays down beside her, back turned. She spends the night awake, and listens as her remaining family breathe.

 

 

One month extends to one year, and in the February Sasuke’s six, Obito brings her and Itachi to the Sapporo Snow Festival. It’s there, as the three of them munching on snowman shaped cookies, that Obito receives an owl in the middle of the square.

A few Muggles glance their way, but no one’s gaze lasts for long, as he tugs the letter from the owl’s leg. Sasuke sees the writing on the envelop for just a moment, looping and clearly in English. As he reads, eyebrows turned in and face serious, Itachi’s hand finds hers, fear seeped into his fingertips, and he asks, “Did something happen?”

Obito looks from Itachi, then to her, and back, before he smiles. “Just something for work seeing if I can come home for a couple of week,” he says. “It’s pretty urgent. Mind staying with Nagato and Konan for a few days?”

“Oh,” Itachi says as his grip tightens. She can feel his nails leaving crescent moon marks against his pale. “Yeah. Sure. When do you leave?”

As the clouds open, releasing a sudden torrent of snow, Obito answers, “I can leave in the morning. Want hot chocolate?”

There’s a small cafe carved out in snow past the lit up sculpture of a hawk. When Obito moved them from their Scottish home to here in Japan, she thought their extended stay had to with bad memories. As she watches his back, fluffy in his blue winter coat, she thinks the reason might be something else entirely, and that she doesn’t like secrets.

 

 

Nagato is a professor at the Akatsuki School for the Magical Arts that sprawls throughout Higashiyama District of Kyoto. Konan, his wife, is a Muggleborn artist who makes a living photographing wildlife around the world. Though Itachi was a bit wary of both the first time they met, Sasuke loved them instantly.

Knowing them, and knowing who they are and what they do, makes it easier when Obito doesn’t come back after two weeks. Two weeks after that, when they still have no word, Nagato offers Itachi a chance to attend school here in Kyoto, and he accepts.  “We still have the address in Scotland,” he says on his first day on an warm April morning with the sun just coming over the cityscape. “Does that mean Sasuke can go to Hogwarts?”

Once Sasuke is eleven, her time away from Britain will eclipse her time in it, but she’s beginning to understand now about blood and family and status, and what it means to be one of three surviving members of one of the most influential Pureblood families in two countries. Itachi left Hogwarts and Britain behind. That means she can’t, even if her memories of the Scottish Highlands involve too much green light, and too much blood. It doesn’t seem fair, but her brother wants her to, and when Nagato says of course, she knows her eleven-year-old fate is sealed.

 

 

On the day Sasuke turns nine, Itachi’s in school, and she hasn’t heard from Obito in two and a half years. She spends it in Botswana, sitting on a quilt in the savanna grass protected by a Shielding Spell, watching a pride of lions drink and play at a watering hole as Konan snaps pictures with a camera bought at a wizarding market in Osaka.

“We’ve been talking about what to get you,” she says as a lion yawns, mane golden in the sun and mouth red, and the camera clicks, immortalizing the animal in his moment of lazy contentment. “Japan isn’t England. You can get a wand at any age, and learn how to use it.”

A cub jumps at his mother who lays still, resigned, as her son tugs on her ear. “But I’m too young to go to school,” Sasuke says, pulling her legs to her chest and tucking her arms around them. “Who’d teach me?”

“Us,” Konan answers, lowering the camera. “Me. Can’t be any harder than teaching you origami shapes, or how to do long division.”

“ _Anything’s_ easier than long division.”

The sunlight shines through her hair the way it does the lions’ fur, making the purple glow, and the brown roots obvious. Between her hair, her red shirt, and her blue shorts, she sticks out against the backdrop of the savanna, vast and green and yellow with a sky so blue even the pride feels small. Comparatively, Sasuke is the smallest of all, with her body still made of sharp ankles and awkward lines, her dark hair frizzing in the heat and pale cheeks burned red like a painful blush, exhaustion bruising deep beneath her eyes. The light right off the water shimmers, and the lions mingle in midday lethargy.

When Konan puts an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close, Sasuke jumps. “You know,” Konan says as Sasuke relaxes, “there’s no one here to tell you that you have to go to Hogwarts. Nagato can negotiate with the headmaster over there about you enrolling here instead.”

“No,” she says, not allowing herself time to think it over, because she knows her answer won’t remain the same otherwise. “I want to go back. Does that mean I still get a wand?”

Konan smiles, just a quick upturn of one side of her mouth, before kissing the top of Sasuke’s head. “’Course,” Konan says. “You can enter school knowing all the basics, too.”

At once, every lioness stands. In the distance, at just the edge of the horizon, a small female herd of impala comes into view. Sasuke, reflexively, tangles her fingers in Konan’s shirt as her heartbeat skips.

“Let’s go,” Konan says as the lionesses crouch, prowling away, and ushers Sasuke up to gather their things. “Where’s your water?”

As the impala run off sideways, still in view, Konan turns the empty canteen into a portkey. “I hate long distance,” she says with a sigh as Sasuke touches it, too.

They disappear, and the first lioness leaps.

 

 

Sasuke’s wand is ten inches, flexible, made of an holly tree’s bark with the core of a raiju’s whisker. Though she had an unsteady start with reading, and still has trouble with any subject involving more a more linear thought process, she takes to magic with the same readiness Itachi did as a first year. When he isn’t at school or with Kisame, his new best friend, he shows her what he can, but for the rest, she has Konan or Nagato.

Though globalization and the spread of the Western identity mean magic is largely Latin based throughout the world, every country has their own spells, too. Sasuke feels two again, trying to figure out why her family will switch languages in the middle of conversation, and realizing only later it was only habit. She was raised bilingual, and since then has picked up on languages from across the world, as Konan brings her along more often than not. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, then, that learning magic becomes a similar process of learning little bits of a lot of things.

In the early January that she’s ten, only a few days after Itachi returns to school, she spends a weekend under the northern lights with Konan, and a group of Alaskan witches they met in the hotel. The youngest girl, a teenage brunette named Nancy with freckles across her nose and a chip in her front tooth, wants to be a teacher when she’s older, and stands across from Sasuke on the rocky cliff, going through the movements of a new spell. “So picture you’re drawing a Y,” she says, “and start from the top left, but when you get to the bottom, make sure to loop it, like a ribbon, got it? Then just finish up.”

Though Sasuke does it slowly, she still mimics well enough to get a smile. “Great,” Nancy continues. “See, it’s easy. Now try and few times and we’ll start on how to cast it, because the Cold Curse and the Warming Spell sound _way_ too similar.”

Across the glade, Konan makes small talk with Nancy’s parents, sipping coffee and periodically snapping photos of how the scenery looks under the northern lights. Nancy’s eyes shimmer green, and in the reflection on the ice covering the rock side, Sasuke can see hers do, too.

She practices the movement until her arm grows tired, and she’s quick enough to be passable. Earlier, Nancy’s mom cast a larger version of the spell across the area, leaving it warm enough to stand around in sweaters and jeans. Though they live in Kyoto now, the house in Hokkaido is still hers and Itachi’s, and they return periodically. Come winter break, any sort of Warming Spell is necessary.

“The word is _Onartok_ ,” Nancy says when Sasuke drops her arm for a final time. “But make sure to pronounce it clearly. If you say anything that even sounds like _Olikpok_ , you’ll have shivers for the rest of the night. There’s no counter-jinx.”

On the second try, she succeeds on warming the rock beneath them another degree or so. She turns to Nancy, preparing to ask if she did all right, and finds the other girl’s eyebrows raised into her bangs. “Oh,” she says, “wow. How?”

With a slight shrug, Sasuke answers, “Guess I’m just good at pronouncing things,” and the sky lights up to the shifting colors of the Killing Curse dancing across the stars.

 

 

There’s a first year named Deidara Sasuke meets one weekend visiting her brother at school. He’s a Halfblood by magic, and half American and half Japanese, too, and his blonde hair is her first reminder of Naruto Northrop in years.

During the few times she’d visited Itachi, she made sure to avoid the other students, and isn’t expecting it when he recognizes her as quickly as he does. “It’s kind of hard not to,” he says when she asks how, standing together behind a column near the doorway of the smaller library found in the main building. “You, like, look exactly like your brother. I don’t look like Sasori at all, but I don’t really want to. He’s weird.”

“Is he your brother?”

“Yeah. And really likes puppets.”

He has blue eyes like Naruto, too, but lighter, she thinks, though her memories of him are foggy are best. In the past few years, as they’ve heard of Orochimaru less and less, she’s gotten better at forgetting everything about that night, and about everything surrounding it. It’s a repression that can’t last forever, but she’ll enjoy it while it’s here.

“Itachi has a thing for birds,” she says, and hugs her bag to her chest. The lobby of the main hall, disguised to Muggle eyes as a tea house left over from the Meiji era, is filled with students milling about, chatting idly or scrambling to finish last minute schoolwork. “I was going to get tea while waiting for him. Want to come?”

Since arriving Hokkaido for the first time five years earlier, she hasn’t had much luck making friends. Until he met Kisame, Itachi hadn’t, either. People their age can’t defend themselves, and it’s difficult to connect with anyone when any sense of closeness comes accompanied by an irrational sense of paranoia that they’re all going to die.

It’s easier to run halfway across the world, for her. For Itachi, it’s better it bury his attention in a book, or in her, and only rarely come up for air.

Deidara, though, has a good smile without a hint of shyness, and maybe just a bit of overconfidence. “You know this place better than I do,” he says. “Lead the way, Uchiha.”

She leads him to a small Muggle shop not far from the main hall that serves green tea lattes from an alley between what was once two geisha houses. Like this, she has a friend, and the idea of leaving hurts worse than ever.

 

 

When the Hogwarts letter arrives, they have to give the owl a day to recuperate from flying so far.

“I know what I said,” Itachi says as the read it over in the privacy of Sasuke’s room, “but you can still back out if you want.”

She was too young when she left Scotland to have many fond memories of it, and still wakes to nightmares of the pain of the Cruciatus Curse, and green light bursting from the end of Orochimaru’s wand. It’s Obito she misses, when she thinks of family she has to miss, but she knows there’s still importance in the name. Here, she has her brother, and Nagato and Konan, and Deidara, and even Kisame, to a point. As a Pureblood Uchiha, though, her name must have been down in the Hogwarts roster since she was born, and that’s important to a legacy she’s understood for too long to reject now.

At least she’s better prepared than Itachi was at this age back then. With the wisdom of hindsight, she realizes the only reason Konan and Nagato bought her a wand at such a young age without Itachi giving a word of protest was to give her a sense of protection. “Yeah,” she says, folding origami paper into a lily in her lap to keep her hands occupied. It’s deep blue, like the sky in the desert or at the top of a mountain far away from any cityscape. “I’ll be back during break, and you’re graduating next year anyway.”

“When I graduate, I’m going to see about applying for an Auror position back in London,” he says. “We’ll still come back, but just—yeah.”

They haven’t heard anything about Orochimaru since the year Obito disappeared, but there’s never been a body nor an arrest, so he’s still at large. Though she knows she should want to know why their family was targeted, she wants, more than that, to put the night behind her. Maybe if she does, the nightmares and paranoia will go away.

As she finishes the creation of the third petal of the lily, she says, “Right,” and after a moment adds, “Promise you won’t disown me if I’m a Hufflepuff?”

“I’ll be happy with whatever you are so long as you are,” Itachi says, and tucks her hair behind her ear, bringing him into her peripheral vision. His white shirt blends with the color of her bed spread. In Japan, like America, witches and wizards care less about proper wizarding attire than they do in Europe. “And there’s no safer place in Western Europe than Hogwarts, so you don’t need to worry, okay?”

That doesn’t help him if he becomes an Auror, and she doubts he’ll be anything but miserable in London anyway. “Itachi,” she says, pausing in her folding, and turning her head to look him in the eye, “I’m not worried.”

In Hogwarts, she’ll learn some of the best Latin-based magic in the world. She’ll have access to one of the most well informed European wizarding libraries. She has to attend, whether she wants to or not, but she has the learning capacity to keep that night from ever being repeated.

Regardless of what anyone else might think, she decided a long time ago that the waking world was never going to scare her again.

 

 

Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters is stuffy from body heat and emotional goodbyes, smothering Sasuke with their forcible reminders of her own aloneness, when a voice calls, “ _Sasuke?_ ”

She lifts her eyes from Deidara’s goodbye letter written in terrible English, scanning the crowd until she finds a shock of blonde brighter than any in the area, and a tan face with a scar from a bad accident with a stapler across the right cheek. Despite any expectations she had to what her reaction would be for this moment, she finds herself returning the hug when Naruto’s body collides with hers.

“You’re _here_ ,” he’s saying before she has a chance to reply, pulling away but keeping his hands on her shoulders. “Merlin, when Dad said you were coming back, I thought he was kidding.”

“I still have the address in Scotland,” she says. “That’s as good as living here, so, hey, why not, right? When did you get taller than me?”

“When did you get an accent?”

Though the accent she developed isn’t as strong as Itachi’s, as result of travelling with Konan so often, it’s enough to be noticeable to anyone away from Kyoto and the surrounding area. With the amount of time she’s going to spend with people from Britain over the next nine months, though, she wonders if she’ll lose it, and hopes she doesn’t. The address in Scotland doesn’t make it home.

Shrugging, she answers, “When I moved to Hokkaido, I guess. Hey, are your parents here?”

The frown he gives her is unfamiliar from the memories she has of him from when they were children, tugging at the scar on his cheek and making his eyebrows furrow. “You just missed my mom,” he says. “They’re too busy with work to stick around.” Then, brightening, he adds, “You don’t have plans to sit with anyone else on the train, right? Want to sit with me and Sakura?”

“Sakura?”

He nods, frown flipping into the same smile from moments earlier. “Yeah, she’s got pink hair,” he says. “Moved next door a couple of years ago. She punched Neji—you know, Dad’s coworker’s nephew?—in the face once for making fun of Hinata. It was was great.”

Though Sasuke’s memories of childhood aren’t any clearer than they were a year ago, she does remember, in her own way, a brown haired boy with eyes too pale who had a superiority complex at the age of six. “Oh,” she says as the train’s whistle blows and Naruto grabs her hand without asking, leading her along. “She sounds like fun.”

The train, she finds, is exactly as Itachi described, compact and grand at once, filled with students dressed in Muggle clothing most have very little idea how to actually put on. “Here she is,” Naruto says once they reach near the back, and pushes open the door to reveal a girl a bit shorter than Sasuke already in her robes, and hair like rose petals. “Sakura, this is Sasuke.”

Sakura stands, pushing her books off her lap and onto the seat. “Sakura Harper,” she says, holding out her hand. Sasuke accepts, more awkward than she’d like to admit. “I’ve heard so much about you since Naruto found out you were coming back. What house do you think you’ll be in?”

“I don’t know,” Sasuke answers. Though she and Itachi discussed houses the day she received her Hogwarts letter, she hasn’t spared much thought to it since. “Ravenclaw probably.”

“Me too,” Sakura says, “even though my dad's was a Hufflepuff. My mother’s a Muggle. Naruto’s totally a Hufflepuff, though.”

“No, I’m a Gryffindor,” he says in the same tone of voice he’d use at five to insist it was his turn with the hovering broom. “I’m going to be a Gryffindor like Dad,” he says, looking to Sasuke now, and from the small sigh the other girl gives, she thinks Sakura must hear this often enough, “and get really good scores on my OWLs, and be head Auror one day and everything. What’s Itachi doing? Did he graduate yet? Itachi’s her brother. He’s like a prodigy and stuff.”

Ambition like that is more of a Slytherin trait, Sasuke thinks as she shakes her head, though Naruto might not be clever enough if he’s anything like he was six years ago. Even so, he’s about as much of a Gryffindor as she is. “He graduates in July,” she says. “He got accepted into a school in Japan, and the school year runs different. It’s longer. My brother was a Ravenclaw, too, Sakura. He says the door likes to mess with the first years.”

The train ride lasts hours, and they talk idly, forcing Sasuke to use more words than she’d like under normal circumstances. In her pocket, she still has Deidara’s goodbye letter, and in her bag, a stack of pictures Konan gave her for when she grows homesick. Anxiety settles heavy in throat, growing worse the closer they come to the Scottish countryside she once called home, but she forces it down, and focuses on talk of schoolwork and Quidditch instead.

 

 

Eastern and Western architecture are drastically different, and impossible to compare, but the moment Sasuke enters Hogwarts’ Great Hall, she knows she’ll never find anywhere in Nagato’s school that makes her feel as small as this room.

Above her is the sky, dark and stormy, artificially projected through magic to reflect the one far beyond the walls, lit by hanging candles that bath the room in natural light. It can easily fit Itachi’s dormitory five times over, with four long tables filled with students draped in plain black robes somehow more striking than the Akatsuki uniforms. At the head on the room, there’s a dias with a shorter table seating professors she recognizes from her brother’s descriptions. The headmaster’s robes are the color of the twilight sky, shifting in hues with every small movement. Everything from the stones that make up the walls to the wood of the tables is so ancient that it feels as though she’s standing in a moment of history rather than a school.

Though most of the other first years are surrounded by this sort of magic and building design much more often than she is, they all look as amazed as she feels. Deidara would love this, and the stray thought makes her again aware of the letter still in her pocket, the feel of it burning against her side.

Chattering fills the hall, but quiets the moment the Sorting Hat’s brim splits to break into song. Hinata Hyland, the younger cousin of the boy Sakura punched, jumps, and Sasuke watches as captivated as any Muggleborn. Though she understands English, and can speak it as well as ever, the hat is singing at a such rapid pace that she can’t translate fast enough, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting.

When it finishes, the older students applaud with a swell of first day of enthusiasm, and Professor McGonagall waits until it dies down before saying, “First years, you will come forward when I read your name. After you are sorted, you will join the rest of your new housemates at their table. Abben, Shino!”

Shino Abbot, who Naruto leans over to whisper he doesn’t recognize, is sorted almost immediately into Hufflepuff. The table breaks into applause and cheers, easily identifying itself, and so the sorting starts.

There aren’t many names Sasuke knows, but Naruto gives a running commentary on those he does—Abbott, Susan and Akerman, Chouji are sorted in Hufflepuff, too, and Brown, Lavender is sorted into Gryffindor. Fourteen more names are called after Brown, Lavender before Professor McGonagall looks down to the scroll in her hands and says, “Harper, Sakura.”

Naruto smiles at Sakura encouraging, and she sets her mouth in a thin line of determination as she walks through the parted crowd her classmates. Muttering breaks out, the voices at the Ravenclaw table nearby just loud enough for Sasuke to understand the reaction is to Sakura’s hair. She sits delicately on the stool, head held high as though she’s used to ignoring low muttering, and the hat sorts her into Ravenclaw before McGonagall can even remove her hand.

She hops off the stool with a brilliant, I Told You So grin, as the table cheers with what Sasuke now knows will happen for the rest of the sorting. Next is Hyland, Hinata, sorted into Ravenclaw, too, as at the table, Sakura takes a seat next to a boy a few years older with white-blonde hair clapping politely, boredly.

After Ingram, Kiba is sorted into Gryffindor, and Jones, Megan into Hufflepuff, Naruto is called, and he walks to the dais with as much confidence as Sakura. At the end of the hall, the Gryffindor students are already poised to cheer again, and he glances to them as he sits. Then McGonagall places the hat over his hand, it slides over his eyes, and they wait.

“Slytherin!”

The room is silent with shock, and the only person who seemed to find this as unsurprising as Sasuke is Sakura. Then McGonagall removes the hat, ushers Naruto off, and the Slytherin table bursts with applause and laughter. A couple boys high five. Someone, laughing, says loud enough to hear, “We got _Northrop_.”

Still clearly in shock, Naruto takes a seat between a brunette with her hair twisted back in a ballerina’s bun, who pats his arm, and Neji Hyland. As Sasuke watches him, she wonders if that’s what Obito looked like when he was sorted into Gryffindor, and hopes with same intensity she felt before that terrible Christmas Eve that she’s placed into Slytherin.

Of following sixteen names called, Sanders, Gaara, who’s also sorted into Slytherin, and Potter, Harry, who’s sorted into Gryffindor, are the only name Sasuke recognizes. “Uchiha, Sasuke,” McGonagall calls, and again, a low muttering overtakes the room.

There’s only three student left after her, and the blonde girl, a Weasley, and the second boy watch with curious eyes as Sasuke steps past to take them seat. The muttering stops. When McGonagall places the hat on her head, the last sight Sasuke sees is of every face watching her attentively, before the brim slips, and covers her vision.

 _It’s been awhile since I sat on a Uchiha’s head_ , says a voice, talking inside her the way Itachi described. _Interesting life you have, I see. You aren’t like the rest of your family._

She frowns. _Yes, I am,_ she thinks, because everyone comments how like her brother she is.

 _Oh, I think not_ , the hat says. You’re cunning, _but your life is too aimless for ambition. You’re clever, but you learn too easily to have a strong drive for it. A person with no home has no loyalty. No, I think with your potential, there’s only one place you belong, and—_

_No—_

“Gryffindor!”

Someone at the Slytherin table, as she pulls off the hat herself, shouts, “What the bloody—” but is interrupted too quickly by the noise coming from the Gryffindor table.

“Never cause a scene” is something she learned when she was too young to understand with that meant, so, without waiting for McGonagall to hurry her along, Sasuke joins the new housemates half her family would disown her for. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke's fourth year of Hogwarts, as usual, doesn't go as planned. 
> 
> (note: I added an additional scene to the end of the last chapter)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A brief citation: the majority of the dialogue from the scene where the names come out of the goblets is at least paraphrased, as well as the DADA Unforgivable Curses scene. 
> 
> Yes, this is an actual plot crossover, too, even if it wasn't originally meant to be.
> 
> Also, a few things happen out of order. Argue with me about sorting all you want. It was mostly born from a conversation with a friend, and then I took a vote on tumblr where only one person answered.

“Honestly, Krum’s supposed to be good at spellwork, too,” Naruto says as he, Sakura, and Sasuke walk together to the Great Hall for the announcements. “How much do you bet he’s going to be their champion?”

As Sakura ties a bow in her hair, she says, “Not even famous Quidditch players have that much luck, Naruto,” before sighing. “We should’ve stopped in the washroom, Sasuke. Does it look terrible?”

Sasuke, who’s busy scribbling down the final touches of her Divinations homework before they reach the Great Hall, barely glances to her friend. “Your hair always looks good,” she says. “It’s not like you haven’t gotten that Beauxbatons’ boy’s attention already anyway. Do you think ‘will be late to class’ is too mundane for Trelawney?”

“Everything’s too mundane for Trelawney,” Naruto says as Sakura again sighs, more dramatic this time. “It’s not like she’s waiting for you to die or anything. I hope Iruka’s our champion.”

“How un-Slytherin of you,” Sakura says. Iruka Underhill is the Hufflepuff prefect, and, in Sasuke’s opinion, too kindhearted to ever compete in so much as a Quidditch match. “Kakashi deserves it. Or Davies.”

“You’re only saying that before they’re Ravenclaws,” Naruto says, frowning impressively. It’s chilly today with a draft blowing in from the front entrance, turning his cheeks a light pink so his freckles pop. “I bet _you_ want Temari to get it.”

For the first few weeks, neither he nor Sasuke were pleased with their house placement at all, but by now, four years later, he’s the only Slytherin she can stand. Temari, a pretty sixth year with sandy hair and a brother in Slytherin their age, took Sasuke under her protection within a number of hours. “Of course I don’t,” Sasuke says, finishing and rolling up the scroll. “She’s been seventeen for like a week, and she’s good, but with a death toll that high? No thanks.”

They reach the crowd of students pushing through the doors, black robes flurrying around them like wings, most separated by groups of friends. Friends are normally made up of housemates or club members, but the Harper-Northrop-Uchiha trio broke that mould by the October of their first year. What began as conversations in hallways or in class solidified after the Halloween troll incident, and was made easy by Naruto’s Uncle Jiraiya’s instructions to the Room of Requirements. It certainly made handling Quirrell and Orochimaru easier at the middle of that year, and then the Chamber of Secrets of Orochimaru during the second. Last year, though, was quiet, with Orochimaru disappearing abruptly to bother Itachi in London rather than Sasuke, she was hoping for a quiet fourth year, too. Now the Triwizard Tournament is here, though, and she doubts that’s going to be the case.

For as many people say that there’s no safer place than Hogwarts, she’s living proof that this isn’t true. Hogwarts has _terrible_ security, with too many hidden passageways and too few proper screenings for future professors, and inviting guests from two international schools is asking for trouble. One way or another, someone will be hurt—whether it’s Viktor Krum because someone wants to sabotage his Quidditch career, Naruto, because someone wants to get the attention of his father, or her, because Orochimaru doesn’t like to leave survives. It doesn’t take the Sight for her to know this year won’t end with an attempt on at least Professor Dumbledore’s life.

With a distracted, hurried goodbye, Naruto heads off to the Slytherin table to join Tenten and Neji in a conversation with Viktor Krum. At the Ravenclaw table, Ino and Hinata wave over Sakura, the French boy not far down occupied with his unnaturally beautiful classmate who’s occupied with Kakashi; at the Gryffindor table, Temari catches Sasuke’s eye, and moves to make room.

There’s food set on the table already, as this is a normal meal instead of a feast, regardless of the announcement. “You took long enough,” Temari says as Sasuke sits, reaching over to pick out one of the small bowls of pumpkin soup and a piece of flamiche. This is the second day of finding Swedish and French foods on the table, and it’s an addition that she’d like to stay for the rest of the year. “You missed Flinch throwing his name in right before the professors came out like he thinks that’ll make a difference.”

Hermione, one of Sasuke’s three roommates, stabs her Yorkshire pudding. “I hope it’s you, Temari,” she says from her place across from them as Kurenai wiggles into the space between Sasuke and Temari. “We can’t have a Slytherin as a champion.”

“It’s not just Flinch,” Kurenai says. “Try Warrington, too. And a few others, but those two are the worst. Hey, Mark, pass me the potatoes?”

Mark’s a sixth year, good friends with Temari through her twin brother in Ravenclaw, with a burn scar on his neck shaped like a leaf from his mother spilling a potion on him when he was three. As he spoons mashed potatoes onto Kurenai’s plate, Professor Dumbledore stands, and the talking ceases. Sasuke looks to Kurenai, who looks back, and they try to eat more quickly before the food disappears.

In his tall pointed hat and green robes of shifting hues, standing beneath a cloudless starry sky and next to the burning goblet, Professor Dumbledore looks a bit like how Sasuke always imagined Merlin. “The goblet has almost come to a decision,” he says, peering out above his glasses to all of them. “It needs another minute, perhaps. When I call the champions’ names, I ask them to please come to the front of the Hall, walk past the staff table, and into the chamber beyond where they will await further instructions.”

As the fire sputters, changing from blue to red, all the candles go out, leaving only the light of the goblet and of the floating pumpkins left from the Halloween feast illuminated. The food disappears back to the kitchens, too, just as Sasuke finishes and Kurenai still hasn’t. Food goes forgotten, though, when the the first small slip of parchment flies out of the flames, and right into Dumbledore’s outstretched hand.

“The champion of Durmstrang,” he says clearly as the flames above the goblet revert to that cold, flickering blue, “is Viktor Krum.”

Through the cheers and applause following his name, Sasuke joins most of her classmates in trying to look at the Slytherin table at the other end of the Great Hall. The others might be looking for Krum, but it’s Naruto she wants, and their eyes meet as he smirks a smirk worthy of Deidara.

When Krum’s left through the side door, they all quiet, and it isn’t long before the flames shift from blue to red. Dumbledore, again, catches the slip of parchment and reads, “The champion from Beauxbatons is Fleur Delacour.”

It’s the girl who Kakashi was ignoring, and who the boy Sakura thinks is cute was talking with earlier. Her hair, silvery and sleek, swings behind her as she walks, and as she leaves, several of her remaining classmates’ forced smiles turn into disappointed tears. The Hogwarts students around them all seem mildly concerned, but no one reaches out to comfort them.

Then, the fire sputters. It’s time. Even Sasuke, who’s been dreading this tournament since she heard about it, feels a low thrill of excitement at the sight of the parchment now clutched in Professor Dumbledore’s hand.

“And the Hogwarts champion,” he says, “is Kakashi Fields.”

The applause from the Ravenclaw table as Kakashi stands are louder than any heard at a sorting, and Sasuke catches sight of Sakura, beaming with house pride. Temari lets out a quiet, disappointed “No!” unheard over the noise as Kurenai just sighs and says, “At least it’s not Warrington, right?”

“Excellent,” Dumbledore says, clapping his hands once in satisfaction. “Now that our champions have been chosen, I’m sure I count on all of you to show them the support they’ll need. By cheering your champion you, they’ll—”

He falls silent as the flames sputter a fourth time. At the high table, professors and Ministry men straighten their postures, watching more closely. When the parchment shoots out, he catches it, reads it, and then looks to the Gryffindor table.

Before he says it, everyone knows and Sasuke knows because she’s been through this twice already. At the Slytherin table, Naruto’s face has gone pale, and across the Great Hall, the reaction from her classmates is more a mix of resignation and worry than accusatory, at least.

“Sasuke Uchiha,” Dumbledore says, and Sasuke walks from the table to the door in silence.

 

 

The champions leave after given instructions interrupted already by outrage over Sasuke’s unexpected addition to the tournament, but she with them. Inside, the Hogwarts professors and Ministry employees stay to talk, but Karkaroff and Madame Maxime are quick to lead Krum and Fleur Delacour away without so much as a backwards glance. Though Sasuke’s known Kakashi for a long time through Sakura and Temari and Quidditch, she expects him to do the same, but he stops instead at the entrance of the Great Hall to fall into step with her when she tries to slow down to give him time to get away.

In the dim lantern light of lower corridor, his blonde hair looks white, and a shadow falls across half his face. “I know it wasn’t you,” he says bluntly as he tucks his hands in the pockets of his robes, slouching. “You don’t have enough of a death wish.”

“Thanks,” she says, and contemplates erasing the prediction on her homework and rewriting it so she’s right. It’s not as though she shouldn’t have seen this coming, after all. “You know, I never thought you had that much of death wish, either.”

“I don’t,” he says with a shrug as they reach the stairs. “Asuma dared me. The only tournament I wanted for my seventh year was the Quidditch finals.”

Though going without Quidditch for a year is a disappointment to Sasuke, too, she can at least return to it next year. She hadn’t thought about what it must be like for the seventh years. “Do you still have to take your N.E.W.T.s?” she asks, and he nods. “Oh, wow, brutal.” She sighs. “British Wizarding laws are ridiculous. We haven’t even done the first task yet. I don’t get why I can’t just opt out.”

As the Triwizard Tournament is a purely European event, she doesn’t know how Wizarding Japan’s government would react, but she imagines it would be more logically than this. If not, then Nagato at least would find a loophole to exploit. Loopholes are something of his speciality—it’s the reason Itachi was able to go the Akatsuki, and she to Hogwarts.

Konan isn’t going to be happy when she hears about this.

“Because Ministry law hasn’t updated itself since it was first written,” Kakashi says. “You’ll be fine. You’re better than half the kids in my year already anyway.”

When Sasuke entered Hogwarts, she’d had a prior two years worth of practice in spellwork, and a knowledge of curses and charms from around the world her classmates had never heard of. In potions, she was dismal, since reading Professor Snape’s handwriting is still difficult, but considering her reputation, she doesn’t doubt that by morning at least Slytherin house will find a way to say she tricked the goblet herself. Her friendship with Naruto’s only smoothed over her relationship with the rest of the Slytherins so much since she hasn’t stopped beating them in Quidditch.

Ravenclaw will believe her most likely, if Kakashi does, and Gryffindor always will, at least. She glances to him and says, “I suppose. But _you’re_ the best in the school. Krum’s a world famous Quidditch player, and Sakura has a theory that Delacour girl is part veela. Makes you wonder how random the selection really is.”

“This is a competition,” Kakashi says, coming to a stop at the top of a fifth floor staircase not far from Ravenclaw Tower. “Of course it’s rigged. That’s why I’m not surprised someone managed to get in a fourth name.”

“Yeah,” she says, and sighs. “I guess this could be worse. I might have to worry about my Potions final come the end of the year, too. Must be so terrible being you, Hatake. Anyway, they probably have a party planned for me, and I have McGonagall first thing in the morning. Hopefully it’s too early in the year for someone to have gotten their hands on firewhiskey.”

As she hops onto the stairs, skipping the trick bottom step, he says, “It’s never too early in the year for firewhiskey, Uchiha. See you tomorrow?”

They part with an agreement to meet up before afternoon classes the following day if they aren’t called for some other tournament business. At the top of the stairs, she stops, and looks down in time to watch his dark robes disappear with a flutter around the corner.

 

 

For a few days, Sasuke has a respite from the tournament outside for congratulatory remarks or the easily ignored hateful glares, but it doesn’t last long. On the Wednesday after Crouch decided there was no chance an unwilling student of fourteen could withdraw her involvement, she’s called out of Potions by a nervous first year for something called the Weighing of the Wands.

She starts out docile enough, not minding seeing Kakashi again, or missing class, but that ends soon enough when she’s lead inside a closet by local tabloid journalist Rita Skeeter. “Well,” the woman says, ushering Sasuke in first so she’s sitting on a crate with her back to the wall rather than the door, “this is cozy. Do you mind answering a few questions, Sasuke?”

When Rita Skeeter says “Sasuke,” she pronounces the U noticeably. The stones on her glasses’ rims glitter in the closet’s dim light, and with a flourish, she removes a green quill from her bag. It’s a poisonous color, like an apple gone rotten, just a few shades lighter than her scaled bag. The bag reminds Sasuke of something she would see in a photo of American witches in the 1980s trying to pose as Muggles, which is not a complimentary comparison. Even Skeeter’s smile seems cold blooded, despite her clear effort to come across as inviting, and Sasuke distrusts her instantly.

To be fair, she distrusts a lot of people she meets, but to be fair to that, too, distrust has kept her alive.

“All right,” she says, not wanting to come across as rude, and Skeeter’s already asking if she can use her Quick-Quotes Quill to record the conversation, so she won’t have to split her concentration with writing, too. “Oh. Fine. But first? It’s Sas-kay.”

Skeeter’s smile grows, and she crosses her legs beneath her robes so the fabric scratches against the parchment. “Oh, yes, I’m very sorry,” she says without sounding very sorry at all. There’s little Sasuke knows about the woman outside of the article she wrote about the Quidditch World Cup this summer, but there doesn’t seem much to like. “So, Sasuke,” she continues, “how did you get your name into the Goblet of Fire? Was it a spell? Did you ask an older student?”

For a moment, Sasuke just looks to her blankly. Then she says, “I didn’t do anything. Where would a fourteen-year-old learn that kind of spellwork? And last I checked, if I got picked because I tricked an older student into submitting my name, there wouldn’t be another Hogwarts champion.”

The quill scribbles of its own accord. “Well, I suppose you’re right about that,” Skeeter says. The closet smells of dust and cleaning oil for a broomstick, something musty and thick and hard to breathe. “But I hear that you’re exceptionally skilled for someone of your age.”

“Yes, and?”

“You must admit it does look a bit suspicious.”

Again, Sasuke keeps her expression blank so Skeeter can glean nothing extra from her, but when she glances down at the parchment, she finds the quill hasn’t stopped writing. Though she can barely read Japanese upside down let alone English, she can still gather that there’s more written than either she or the woman has said. “You know, I don’t think I want you using that after all,” Sasuke says, raising her eyes to meet Rita Skeeter’s jeweled gaze. In the flickering of the small candlelight, the placement of the shadows shifts across her face, aging her then reverting like a series of snapshots. “If you don’t want the split in your concentration, I’d be happy to record it for you.”

Waving her hand dismissively, she says, “Pay no attention to the quill. It’s only—”

Sasuke reaches over, and plucks out the quill mid-word, laying it across the parchment. “We’re done,” she says as she stands, and Skeeter stares at her quill in shock. “Don’t bother asking for a second interview.”

As she steps out of the closet, Skeeter close behind, Sasuke’s called immediately over to the photographer. Kakashi glances to her with a raised eyebrow; the photographer seems mildly concerned; no one else appears to have noticed the tension. “It’s nothing,” she says, voice low, as Kakashi goes to ask, and they’re ushered into position with the girls in front of the boys.

With the camera’s soft click, Sasuke’s personality is captured for the cover of a newspaper’s front page story. She wonders if her image will even have the patience to stay in her frame.

 

 

Today the Room of Requirements looks like a drafty old room in Tzfat Sasuke stayed in with Konan a couple months back, complete the shuttered doors to a balcony now inaccessible, and unevenly painted blue ceiling. There’s an addition of a looking glass too, a long, tall, oval one with a thick rim deserving of an evil queen wishing for Skeeter’s poison apples, showing not some little girl but instead roaring dragons in a forest.

“I hate everything,” she says with an exaggerated sigh, dropping back against the bed so she sinks deep into the downy comforter, not wanting to watch the scene in front of her any longer. The canopy surrounding the bed flutters in an imagined wind. Once Naruto and Sakura learned that Sasuke had been across the world, they relied on her to create the settings, mostly. “Who thought it was a good idea to put school students against _dragons_?”

Once, when she was just beginning to learn how to use her wand, Konan took a job in Australia, where she was commissioned by _International Magical Geograph_ y to snap photos of the dragons that roamed the Outback. It was late October when Nagato was in the thick of grading midterms, and Sasuke’s brother and friends were busy study for exams or practicing spellwork, which was the time of year Konan was most likely to bring her along for a trip. As a responsible adult, though, she hadn’t allowed Sasuke anywhere near dragons outside of those in Far East Asia regardless of how much she begged, because they aren’t the sort of creatures you approach without proper training. To her knowledge, none of the tournament’s participants have training in handling dragons.

For the first time, she feels a spike of fear join her annoyance.

As Sasuke imagines the mirror out existence, Sakura says, “You have a couple weeks until the first task. We can think of something.”

“I bet Krum and the girl already know,” Naruto says. “Karkaroff and Maxime probably told them the moment they found out.”

Knowing Kakashi, he must have found out by now, too, or he’s going to soon, but there’s also a chance he hasn’t, which would make him the only one. Tomorrow’s a Thursday, Sasuke’s busiest day, when it’s doubtful she’ll be able to find time to talk to anyone outside her housemates. “Sakura,” she says, looking up and over to her friend whose pink pajama shirt matches her magically mutated hair perfectly. “Can you find Kakashi and tell him, like, tonight?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sakura says, then smiles. “Hey, the two of you could probably brainstorm together. Naruto can ask Professor Hagrid if he knows anything about dragons, and I can check the library, and one of you’ve got to know a spell, right?”

“ _How to Train Your Dragon_ unfortunately isn’t a how-to guide on training a dragon,” Sasuke says, rubbing the heel of her palm against her forehead. “Whatever. You’re right. This is me, I’ll figure something out.”

At eleven, Sasuke imitated Quirrell's Binding Spell she’d seen just minutes earlier to trap him, and destroyed the Philosopher’s Stone before Orochimaru could breach Hogwarts’ defenses. A year later, she tricked the the entrance of the Chamber of Secrets into letting her in by mimicking Parseltongue she’d heard in a stranger’s memory, and stopped the basilisk by getting another one of Orochimaru’s helpers to kill it for her after blinding it. Improvisation is her gift, because she’s clever, and she’s talented. Dragons, though, won’t be tricked the way humans can be tricked, and she doubts her magic is powerful enough to pierce those scales. More than that, if the first task is dragons, the others are inevitably going to be harder.

Itachi could figure this out, she thinks, which doesn’t make her feel any better.

Sakura knocks her knee against Sasuke’s so their flannel pants scratch audibly together. “That’s the spirit,” she says. “Hiccup would be proud of you.”

“Who’s Hiccup?” Naruto asks, woefully behind on their Muggle pop culture references as usual. Though a Pureblood, too, Sasuke’s still as immersed in both cultures as she was when she younger.

“Nevermind,” she says quickly, ignoring the look of hurt that crosses his face. “I guess it could be worse. I could be dealing with a catty tabloid article, too.”

Though she’s certain Skeeter will get her revenge at some point, Sasuke was barely a footnote in the article about the champions. Instead, Viktor Krum was the victim of the Quick Quill, with his answers so clearly fabricated she doesn’t understand how anyone could believe them at all.

With a frown, Naruto says, “I’ve heard, y’know, not great stuff about her, ‘cause she’ll stalk Auror investigations and then write up classified information, which makes Dad’s job harder, but I didn’t think she’d show up. Schools don’t seem as dramatic as murders.”

“This is the first Triwizard Tournament in fifty years,” Sakura says. “It’s like how in the Muggle world journalists will write up celebrity gossip on football players. Some things just attract certain types of people.”

Sasuke’s nerves haven’t calmed, but when the subject changes to discussing all the reasons Rita Skeeter is terrible, she doesn’t try to steer it away.

 

 

There’s a Hungarian Horntail, her eggs, and a stadium of people. Sasuke walks in line with the crouching dragon, her hair twisted back in a bun to keep off her face, the cool November wind ripping through her thick Hogwarts robes. For as skilled as she’s known to be, she’s the youngest and the smallest and now the last, and the audience watches her intently.

She’s not expecting it when the dragon attacks first, and narrowly escapes by dodging behind a mass of boulders. The one next to her bursts at the force of a hit from its tail, sharp stones catching her side. As the dragon breathes in, creating enough of a wind to rustle her clothes and hair, she runs back into the open. A few people in the audience let out exclamations of surprise and warning, but she ignores it. Her reflexes are good. Its insides are vulnerable, said the single helpful book in the library. That’s not much to go on, but for her, it’s enough.

It breathes out, releasing a column of fire so large it covers half the arena, but she casts the strongest Shield Charm she knows in the same moment, repelling the flames. Smoke and ash fill the air, making it hard to breathe, but she can still see the smouldering orange where the dragon’s mouth is, already disappearing as it closes its jaw. “ _Stupefy_!” she calls, voice hoarse, and watches as the red sparks disappear right down its throat.

The effect is instantaneous. It freezes, mouth still hanging open, one foot held out to strike, its tail mid-flick. As quick as though it were the snitch she were catching, she darts below the dragon’s underside, and scoops up the golden egg. Already, the Stunning Spell is wearing off, but that doesn’t matter now. She rolls out, egg in her arms, and the nearby dragon trainers take it from here.

Attacking a Hungarian Horntail head on might be one of the craziest things she’s ever done, but she managed. Sasuke Uchiha, age fourteen, finished the first task in seven minutes with minimal injury, and feels so relieved she thinks could laugh if only her throat didn’t hurt quite so bad. Participating in this tournament may not be terrible, she thinks, and maybe she can even win.

 

 

Three days after the first task, Kakashi corners Sasuke after dinner just outside the Great Hall and asks, “Do you have a swimsuit?”

She nearly drops the newspaper in her hands, so intent on the article she was reading that she hadn’t realized anyone was approaching. “No,” she says, folding the paper. “Why?”

“Find one,” he tells her, “and meet me in the Prefects’ Bathroom at ten with your egg. Password’s ‘pine fresh.’”

With this, he leaves, and three hours later, she finds herself stepping through entrance of the Prefects’ Bathroom wearing a bathing suit Temari transfigured for her under her clothes. Kakashi’s already there, watery light casting odd, bright shadows across his body as he sits at the edge of the pool in a pair of typical Hawaiian print swim shorts, feet dangling in the suds. There’s a book on his lap, but he looks up when she closes the door behind her.

“Kurenai raved about his place last year, but I didn’t believe her,” Sasuke says as she slips out of her robes and shoes. “What does this have to do with the egg?”

“No idea,” he answers, slipping in, “but I saw Krum diving into the lake with his, so I figure there must be some connection with underwater. I owe you after the tip on the dragons.”

The room smells like lilacs, and every so often a shoot of pink and purple bubbles jump from the pool in synchronized arches, reminding her of the Akatsuki’s bath house. “You guys are really holding out on us,” she says as she joins him. The water’s warm, and a slow undercurrent creates a buoyancy normal pools don’t have. “Isn’t diving into the lake in this weather a bad idea with his shoulder?”

Unlike she and Kakashi, Krum and Fleur Delacour were both injured during their fight with the dragons, though she’s stilled tied with Krum for best score. Despite apparently snatching his egg without even attracting the dragon’s attention, Karkaroff knocked points for “time management,” which Sasuke thinks means “favoritism.”

Shrugging, Kakashi says, “If anything happens, Madame Pomfrey can take care of it. Ready?”

Sasuke glances down at her egg, partially submerged in water. “Yeah,” she says, “I guess,” and then they duck under the foam.

In the bubble filtered, underwater light, Kakashi’s hair is silver, waving around his head like discolored seaweed. When he nods, she nods back, and together, they pry open their eggs.

“ _Come seek us where our voices sound_ ,” sings a sweet voice drastically different from the screams heard above the water, “ _we cannot sing above the ground. And while search for us, ponder this: we’ve taken what you sorely miss. An hour long you’ll have to look, and recover what we took, but past the hour—the prospect’s black, too late. It won’t come back_.”

She comes back up sputtering for breath, breathing in bubbles from the effort it took to stay under for so long. It’s as though they were singing as slowly as they could on purpose. “You okay, Uchiha?” Kakashi says, who recovered quicker, and laughs at her weak glare.

“I’m fine,” she says as she regains her composure and wipes her face of multicolored bubbles, hiding her embarrassment. “Well, I guess that answers why Krum was suicidal enough to dive into the lake in November.”

As she pulls herself up onto the rim of the pool, keeping just her legs in to the mid-calf, Kakashi says, “Might explain his behavior, but not what we have to do. Or. Hm. Are there merpeople in the lake?”

She pauses in wringing out her hair to look over to the unrealistic stained glass image of the mermaid on the wall only to realize the mermaid is wringing out her hair, too. “Um,” Sasuke says, releasing her own, “I don’t know. I make it a point not to swim with giant squids, and I’ve never read _Hogwarts, A History_.”

“I have,” he says, which isn’t terribly surprising, as that book is scripture for Ravenclaws, “but I don’t think it ever mentioned merpeople. It doesn’t mention half the other secret passageways either, though.”

When she was a first year, she tried because Sakura read it, but her English wasn’t good enough at the time to follow what it was saying. Now she likely could, but she doesn’t have the interest. “I think Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff created the Room of Requirements when they were drunk,” she says, flexing her foot to flick bubbles in the air. “Anyway, I wouldn’t put it past Hogwarts to have merpeople in the lake. Are there any other creatures that can’t speak above ground?” she adds, and again, he shrugs. “Whatever. It’s merpeople. What about the rest? I’m guessing they’re going to take something from us.”

“It would need to be something with emotional attachment,” he says, placing the wet, slippery eggs beside her and leaning against the edge near her knees, “and it needs to be something they can identify without having to ask us.”

“That would make an object hard to get,” she says, swirling her feet around in the water, “but people need to breathe. But I doubt there’s seriously an hour limit no matter what it is.”

Kakashi pushes his wet hair off his eye, and says, “Could be people. I’ve read about spells that could preserve a person for about an hour or so, or they could be in a Bubble-Head Charm. Whatever it is, we still need to figure out a way to breathe underwater.”

“I’m going home for winter break,” she says. “Like, back to Japan, and my brother’s best friend probably knows something. He’s weirdly obsessed with all thing aquatic.” Even if Kisame doesn’t know, there were crab fishers in Japan’s Wizarding world, too, so they must have had a spell to help them breathe underwater.

“How does that help?” Kakashi says. “Wait, you mean you can do magic overseas? What about the Trace?”

Though they’ve known each other for years, they weren’t close until recently, and she’d forgotten he didn’t know the extent of how unique her situation really is. “My wand was never registered in Wizarding Britain,” she says. “I can do whatever I want even if I’m in London. Dual citizenship is brilliant, isn’t it?”

His eyebrows are raised in surprise, accenting the thin scar above his left one. “I have housemates would be kill for that privilege,” he says, and she smiles, straightening her back. “I guess I’ll stay here. My house doesn’t have the most extensive library, and Flourish and Blotts throws you out past ten.”

“You could come with me, if you want,” she says, and regrets it immediately. “I mean, a victory for one of us is still a victory for Hogwarts, right? And I have access to more resources than you have.”

If he notices her embarrassment, he’s kind enough not to show it. Being direct isn’t an approach she’d normally shy away from, but this also isn’t a normal situation. “Sounds better than what I had planned,” he says to her surprise. “My dad wouldn’t mind if I did, if you want.”

There’s a smile in his words that relaxes her more easily than a bubble bath could. “Konan and Nagato haven’t minded when I brought Sakura or Naruto before,” she says, “and Itachi’s used to me not staying in London, so. Just don’t be shocked if you get woken up by an over enthusiastic blonde entering the house at dawn on the first day.”

“And over enthusiastic blonde? Is Northrop coming?”

Before she’s even aware she’s doing so, she explains everything about Konan and Nagato and Deidara, and how to create a portkey from household object to make world travel cheap and easy. Kakashi listens with more focus than Naruto or Sakura ever would, and Sasuke feels lighter than she since the goblet first released her name.

 

 

Sasuke and Kakashi’s plans are ruined a few days later when she learns from Professor McGonagall that she needs to stay this break for something called the Yule Ball. By the time Sasuke finds him in the library at lunch, he’s heard of it from his Head of House, too, and seems just as disappointed as she is.

“I can still write to that friend I was telling you about,” she says, sitting on the table with her legs crossed at the ankles while he sits on the chair beside her with his Astronomy book still open in front of him. “If neither of us find something in the meantime, he’ll still be able to get back to us before February twenty-fourth. “

“You know, I don’t think we’re allowed to work together,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “You’re a bad influence on me, Uchiha.”

Rolling her eyes, she says, “Like you’ve never broken rules before. Come on, Fields, take pity on the poor, clueless fourth year.”

He shoves lightly at her knee and shakes his head, looking down towards his book, but she still catches the barest hint of a smile. “I should be trying harder to beat you,” he says, flipping a page so it crinkles, the noise sharp in the stale library air. “That ego could take a good bruise.”

“Are you admitting you think I could win?” she says, keeping her tone light to disguise how her heartbeat jumps. “I never thought I’d see the day. Maybe I should give you a hint anyway. You can consider it a free chance.”

Across the library, someone that sounds an awful lot like Hermione Granger laughs loud enough for Madame Pierce to press a finger to her lips. Kakashi glances back up to Sasuke out of the corner of his eye and says, “Hey, I will admit it. You’re scary. No one’s supposed to be able to deflect dragon’s fire.”

“England just has weak Shield Charms,” Sasuke says with a shrug. “It’s weird here. Watered down almost. Imperialism means Britain nearly took over the world at one point, but Japan was untouched for a long time, you know? So they care a lot less about mixing Wizarding culture with Muggle culture, and the spellwork is insane.”

It’s rare that she talks about the differences between Britain and Japan, because most days, she feels alienated enough. Between her accent and the history surrounding her family, there’s always been a gap with herself and her classmates. Seeing Kakashi impressed, however mild mannered his expression, is almost satisfying, and hearing him say it is better. Though she knows she’s good, the occasional validation is still nice. He was right before, about her ego; it’s not as though humility was ever one of her virtues.

With a loud snap, he shuts his book, and stretches, cracking his back. “Travelling sounds better than dancing,” he says almost thoughtfully, and Sasuke nods, swinging her legs back and forth as she wonders how long it’ll be before she’s desperate enough to ask Naruto.

 

 

Though the majority of the school have a full fledged, undying love of Mad-Eye Moody, he makes Sasuke nervous. People focus on the blue, revolving, all-seeing eye so much so that they ignore his ordinary one, but she noticed by the third lesson that while the right watches the other students, the left watches her. It’s not constant, but it’s enough to make her wary, and she’s fully aware it’s pride that’s keeping her from writing to either Itachi or Minato about whether or not hiring him was for her. Even after the quiet of last year, most of the staff hasn’t been as secretive as they thought about considering her a safety risk.

She’d be more insulted if she didn’t think they were right.

Defense Against the Dark Arts is the fourth year Gryffindors’ last class of the last day before holiday, which is admittedly better than Care of Magical Creatures. She takes her usual seat at the first row near the door next to Seamus, who has Dean on his other side, and pulls back her hair when she sees the board. _Unforgivable Curses_ , is written in the middle in Moody’s sloppy, all upper-case handwriting underlined twice, with underneath added, _Wands Only_.

Across the aisle, Hermione glances Sasuke’s way, concern written into the thinness of her lips, but Sasuke instead looks to Neville. He’s gone pale, but doesn’t look surprised; they’ve been studying curses for weeks, and given Moody’s attitude, it was bound to come to this eventually.

Moody enters with his usual uneven footfalls, and today the noise of wood against wood seems so loud. “Well, I’ve caught you up on everything you need to know,” he says, both eyes fixed forward with equal intensity as his places an opaque box on the desk. The electric blue one glows in the candlelight. “I thought since it’s the final day of class, we’d have our final lesson of the unit. I’m not supposed to teach you what an illegal Dark curses look like until the sixth year. You’re not supposed to be old enough to deal with them until then.

“But I say, the sooner you know what you’re up against, the better. How are you supposed to defend yourself against something you’ve never seen? A wizard who’s about the put an illegal curse on you isn’t going to tell you what he’s about to do. He’s not going to be nice and polite to your face. You need to be prepared. You need to be alert and watchful. So...do any of you know which curses are most heavily punished by Wizarding law?”

There’s a long silence where no one moves before several people raise their hands. “My dad told me about one,” Ron says with the same nervous glance to Sasuke that Hermione gave. “The Imperius Curse.”

“Ah, yes,” Moody says. “Your father _would_ know that. Giving the Ministry a lot trouble, that one.” He pauses, leaving forward to crack open the box, and quickly pulls out a thin, blue-green snake before shutting again. “ _Imperio_.”

Instantly, the snake slithers from his hand, but remains upright on the desk, weaving in small circles with its tongue flicking out to taste the air. Sasuke crosses her arms, digging her nails into her skin. After her second year, she doesn’t have a terrible fondness for snakes, or spiders, and hadn’t expected the lesson to be any worse.

The snake leaps, rolling into a wheel and rolling in circles around the desk. No one laughs; by now, everyone knows of at least one person who’s been cursed. “Total control,” he says as it stops, and straightens out, balancing on the very tip of its tail. “I could make it jump out the window, drown itself—the Imperius Curse can be fought, but it takes a real strength of character, and not everyone’s got it. Better avoid being hit if you can.” The snake drops, free, but Mood grasps it fast by the neck before it can slither away. “Anyone else know one? Another illegal curse? Yes?”

When Neville, visibly shaking, lowers his hand and says, “The Cruciatus Curse.”

Sasuke listens as Moody explains briefly what the Cruciatus Curse is, though everyone here knows, and feels five again when Obito sat her and Itachi down to explain why the red spell hurt. Moody sets down the snake, but it barely moves before he points his wand and says, “ _Crucio_.”

It lays there on the desk, wriggling and contorting in place, hissing in short spurts of pain too pronounced to allow it to make a continuous sound. She watches it struggle, remembering what it was like, how it felt like her nerves were breaking and reforming just to break again, and the nightmares that never really have gone away—but more importantly she watches how _Moody_ , the _professor_ , a man once an Auror working to capture people who routinely use Unforgivable Curses, doesn’t relent even though his point is made.

Then Hermione calls out, “Stop it!” and, finally, he does.

Class attention is on Neville entirely, who’s shrunk deep into his seat with his face flushed from nausea. On the desk, the snake relaxes, still twitching, but silent; just because the spell is over doesn’t mean the pain gone.

“Pain,” Moody says, folding his hands over the top of his walking stick. “You don’t need thumbscrews or knives to torture someone if you can perform the Cruciatus Curse. Now, does anyone know any others?”

Everyone knows someone who knows someone who’s been killed, or tortured, or placed until the Imperius Curse, and no one raises their hand. That night, Dad died first, collapsing in stages to his knees then his side, falling so his face was hidden and he became a single mound of dark hair and dark clothes against the white snow. Mom, whether out of anger or desperation, tried to cast it, too, only to be killed by the same curse just long enough after for her daughter to see it. Maybe a demonstration of these is necessary given the state of the country, but Sasuke’s had enough nightmares for the past nine years that she could probably cast the Cruciatus or Killing Curses herself.

Nearly a minute goes by before Hermione finally half raises her hand. “ _Avada Kedavra_ ,” she says when called on without looking anyone.

“Yes, the last and the worst,” Moody says with his hand back on the frantically struggling snake’s neck. “ _Avada Kedavra_. The Killing Curse.”

As he lifts his wand, Sasuke realizes that for all her Gryffindor bravery, she can’t handle seeing this again, but can’t seem to bring herself to move. The fear is old, and cold, and she watches with wide eyes as she says, “ _Avada Kedavra_.”

The snake dies in a swish of green bright as the Northern Lights, silent and swift and helpless.

 

 

A week passes, and Sasuke’s nights are dream filled with her days a bleak repetition of holiday homework dodging both attempted requests for dates, and her two friend’s attempts at comfort. It’s midday now on a Tuesday with the common room largely empty, most of her housemates either outside enjoying the freshly fallen snow or still sleeping, and she sits close to the fire with a book on martine spells lying open on her lap.

This is how Neville finds her, looking to claim the free chair by the hearth with a thick book of his own under his arm. “Oh, hello,” he says upon seeing her, as she was sitting partially hidden by that same chair. “Sorry. I can find somewhere else.”

“You don’t have to,” she says, looking up and tucking her bangs behind her ear. “I’m not doing anything important.”

He sits, the armchair sagging under his weight as it will with even the lightest first year. From the angle at which the book is placed now, she can’t see the title, but she knows it isn’t one bought in Diagon Alley for school. “I thought maybe you were doing homework,” he says as he settles himself. “Hermione’s already finished hers. I heard her telling Ron and Harry they should be doing theirs in the library.”

“Sakura’s finished hers, too,” Sasuke says. “How dare they be so prepared.”

With a slight frown, Neville says, “I don’t know how they have the concentration,” before glancing down at her lap and adding, “Why are you reading about spells to breathe underwater?”

Detailed on the open page is instructions on a spell to transfigure yourself into a fish, but she has pride, and she refuses to do that to herself. “It’s for the second task,” she says, and explains briefly what that is, because there’s no reason to keep it a secret. “I’m not worried about swimming. It’s the breathing.”

“I might have an idea for that,” he says to her surprise, pulling his book onto his lap so she gets a quick peek at the cover before he flips it open. _Magical Water Plants and the Mediterranean_ , the cover reads. “Here it is. See? Gillyweed!” Before she can ask him to pass the book to her, he reads the short description aloud. “I bet Snape has it in his office cupboard,” he adds when he’s done.

Using a slippery plant from abroad to turn herself partially into a fish is nearly as bad as using a spell to turn herself entirely into a fish, but he looks so earnest that she can’t say that. Instead she smiles, and asks, “Where’d you get that book? Seems like a lucky coincidence.”

“Professor Moody gave it to me after class,” he says, “to make me feel better. I guess he felt bad about the lesson. Said he heard I liked Herbology from Professor Sprout, and that I might be interested. Didn’t he do anything for you?”

She bites back a sharp reply about not needing anything, and settles for another smile. “He illegally offered me help,” she says, glancing from Neville’s honest, open expression to the book on his lap, “but I turned him down. I wouldn’t want him to get in trouble.”

Seemingly doubtful now, he says, “Oh. That’s nice of him.”

They sit reading together for a while, commenting occasionally on something interesting but staying mostly quiet. Eventually, though, she excuses herself with a lie about needing to return her book to the library, and slips away.

 

 

Moody, as Sasuke suspected, is inside his office grading papers when she arrives. “Office hours begin in an hour, Uchiha,” he says, blue eye swiveling in her direction, but his door isn’t warded against students, and she enters anyway.

“I wasn’t aware professors had regular office hours once classes ended,” she says, coming to a stop in front of his desk. He raises his head and places down his quill, giving her his full attention, but she keeps eye contact and doesn’t move to take a seat. “I’ll make this quick, Professor. Why are you trying to help me with second task?”

After seeing Moody’s face as the cast the Cruciatus Curse, she doesn’t trust him, and this only proves that distrust wasn’t unfounded. He raises an eyebrow, scars wrinkling, and says, “Professors aren’t allowed to interfere. This is a serious accusation you’re making, Uchiha.”

She stands straighter, though she knows how with her height and build, that doesn’t mean much. “I don’t believe in convenient coincidences, Professor,” she says. “The professors know exactly what the second task is, and suddenly Neville has a book that could be the answer to all my problems. I’m young, but I haven’t survived this long out of luck, _Professor_.”

For a moment, he watches her evenly, saying nothing, and she matches his stare. Then he stands, pushing himself up laboriously with one hand on the desk. “I can see why you were sorted into Gryffindor,” he says. “A Ravenclaw or Slytherin would never directly confront a figure of authority without a safety net. I could dock fifty points for an unfounded accusation.”

“But you won’t,” she says, keeping her eyes on him. “My housemate ending up with a book connecting the second task looks too suspicious. So why are you trying to help me? You don’t seem the pitying type.”

“Your name didn’t end up in that goblet by accident,” he says, and nods at the chair for her to take a seat. She doesn’t. “You know that, Dumbledore knows that, I do, too—you’ve fought Orochimaru’s lackeys twice,, but you haven’t faced him, and I don’t think you’ll make through the year without meeting him. You’re as clever as your brother, from what I’ve seen, but the rest of your family was all clever, too, and now they’re dead. There’s no better place to attack you than during one of the tasks.”

Though Moody is an excellent liar, Sasuke knows there’s something more to this. His tone is as gruff and growling as usual, but his body is tense, skin tight around his scars. As she says, “Has anyone told you how I defeated Quirrell?” she asks as he pulls out a hip flask, and takes a long gulp.

“I know the story,” he says, slipping it away, and she takes a step back, to the side. Both his eyes follow her face in a disjointed, uneven movement. “What you did in there would prepare you more for a Curse Breaking job than meeting with a Dark wizard.”

She ignores him for a moment, and takes a look around the room for the first time since entering. First, there’s Moody himself, who’s relaxed now, the tension having disappeared from him completely. Then, behind him, almost as though he were guarding it, is a long chest with more locks than are strictly necessary, even for someone as paranoid as he is. On the wall above the desk is what she first mistakes as a very dusty mirror before recognizing it as a Foe-Glass, like the one that hangs above the door in the Aurors’ main office she’s visited Itachi in more than once over the past few summers. It wouldn’t appear out of place to her at all among his other Dark Detectors, if not for one of the shadowy figures to suddenly grow clearer in definition just as she hears McGonagall's voice say, “There is no adjusting of grades after—”

Then her voice cuts off as she turns a corner, and the shadow loses its clarity.

Sasuke’s gaze falls back to Professor Moody, her entire observation taking place in the span of a few short seconds. “That’s not why I’m asking. Have a good holiday, Professor,” she says, and leaves without giving him the opportunity to reply.

 

 

The next morning Sasuke finally receives a letter from Kisame detailing an advanced Breathing Charm that essentially turns a person’s lungs in a scuba diver's oxygen tank.  By lunch, she’s shown it to Kakashi, and within a week, they’ve practiced on themselves hours after curfew in the privacy of the prefect’s bathroom until they’re both certain they can do it.

Now it’s near midnight, or so she’s guessing, and she sits cross-legged on the marble floor surrounding the bath, toweling out her hair. “We have until February,” she says, watching Kakashi out of the corner of her eye as he dries off, too. Today is the anniversary of her parents’ deaths, and practicing for the past few hours has been a good way to pretend it isn’t. They might be finished, but she can still force a conversation just a few minutes longer when she can tell herself the day is done. “It shouldn’t be that hard to learn to make the spell last an hour.”

As of now, she barely managed ten minutes, and he only a couple minutes more than that. “I suppose,” he says, and drapes the towel over his shoulders. “You’re on your own if you want to practice after the ball tomorrow. I’m not doing both.”

In her focus on mastering a new spell and avoiding the memory of _that_ Christmas Eve, Sasuke had momentarily forgotten about the ball. “What?” she says. “Have a date you actually plan on dancing with all night?”

“I don’t have a date,” he says, suddenly looking anywhere but her. “Kurenai said she’d do that opening dance, but she’s going with Asuma.”

After a short, vaguely uncomfortable pause, Sasuke says, “I don’t have a date, either. Even Naruto got a date with Hinata.”

There’s another pause, even longer, and then Kakashi says, “We could go with each other.”

“We could,” she says, and he looks to her again. “We might even have fun.”

It’s been years since anyone’s made Sasuke so flustered, if anyone ever had at all, but she thinks she’s been hiding it well enough, and that she hides it well enough now when he smiles at her almost shyly. “There aren’t any rules about dating the competition,” he says, and despite the gloom of the day, she actually laughs.

 

 

The dress robes Sasuke bought this past August are a deep red better suited for autumn than every TV high school’s Winter Wonderland Senior Formal, and she stands out more noticeably than Kakashi in his plain grey when she follows him out onto the snowy grounds.

“You looked uncomfortable,” he says as they take a seat on a stone bench cleared of snow. Hedges arch over them, twinkling with real fairy lights. “Not big on socializing?”

“I don’t mind socializing,” she says, eyes on him but still partly focusing on the empty path just beyond the bushes. She’s always more anxious in the days surrounding Christmas Eve, and this year she has more reasons than the others. “I just don’t appreciate gossip columnists.”

To Sasuke’s annoyance, she entered the Great Hall to find Rita Skeeter lurking near the dais with her photographer, a piece of parchment already floating next to her. By the time the champions’ dance was finished, the Quick-Quotes Quill was scribbling furiously, scurrying across the page as she spoke out of the corner of her mouth. Because of Konan, Sasuke’s meant reporters from around the world, and they’re all deplorable to at least some degree, but none so much as Rita Skeeter.

It’s her eyes that do it, Sasuke’s decided. They look too similar to some ragged, starving urban animal scavenging for food.

Kakashi shrugs. “At least we haven’t had to deal with her yet,” he says. “I almost feel bad for Krum.”

As of now, Krum’s been Skeeter’s focus, as a star Quidditch player and champion all at once, but Sasuke’s suspicious by nature, and knows it won’t stay that way for long. “Well, she was watching us for half the night,” she says, dragging her feet across the snow to draw a thin line. Her heels are an off white, and against the white backdrop, they look the color of bone. “We’re going to have some star-crossed lovers article written about us by New Years.”

Though she meant it as a joke, Kakashi doesn’t laugh, leaving another beat of awkwardness between the two of them. Then he says, “Yeah, I guess. You know, Professor Moody was watching us, too.”

She hadn’t noticed that, having purposely avoided looking to him. Ever since she confronted him, thoughts about McGonagall’s reflection appearing in the Foe-Glass have come and gone, but when she tried to talk about it to Naruto and Sakura, they didn’t think anything of it. After everything Moody’s been through, he must be a little paranoid about everyone, Naruto said. Sakura just seemed to think Sasuke was stressed, and Moody happened to be the professor to aggravate her further.

Neither of those seemed right, nor were they particularly reassuring. Sasuke takes a deep breath and exhales, releasing a swirl of condensation as the frigid air claws at her throats and lungs. “He’s not as discreet as he thinks, is he?” she says, smoothing out her skirts. “I talked to him the other day. He admitted to thinking there’s going to be an attack any day.”

“Well, he shouldn’t,” Kakashi says, tucking his nose into the collar of his dress robes. His ears and cheeks are chapped red from the cold. “Your name had to be added to the tournament for the reason.”

With the number of guests allowed on the grounds, the defenses this year are weaker than usual, but she doesn’t understand why she needs to participate in an event that places her as the center of attention. “Unless something goes wrong,” she says, thinking suddenly of the way Moody relaxed after he drank from his flask. It couldn’t have been alcohol; she would’ve smelled that. Before Kakashi can ask, she smiles, and says, “Whatever. I don’t want to talk about something depressing. Want to get out of here? I know somewhere no one will find us.”

Again, he shrugs, and says, “Why not?”

He seems to be affected by the cold more than she is, and neither of them want to return to the dance, so even though she doesn’t think they’re supposed to leave, she wraps her hand around his and pulls him to stand as she does. “Where we’re going is a secret,” she says. “Naruto and Sakura know, but no telling anyone.”

“If today’s a day of sharing a secrets,” he says, “I know a way to get into the school without crossing through the entrance.”

Though she knows a few, too, she allows him to show her to a new secret passageway behind the greenhouses. They talk only a little, but the quiet is companionable, and he lights his wand for the long walk to the exit behind the statue of Gregory the Smarmy. Both their dress robes are dirty by the time they emerged, and her bun and heels are lost causes. As she leads him to the nearest stairway, she undoes to ribbon and removes the pink and silver pinwheel she’d stuck through her bun, shaking her hair out so it falls flat across her shoulders and back. She knows she must look like more of a mess than he does, when he already has a smudge of dirt across his cheek and more speckled in his hair, but she cares less than she should.

In all her three and a half years at Hogwarts, she’s never show anyone the Room of Requirements, but she stops him now in front of its entrance, and says, “Wait here.”

He’s confused, clearly, but does as asked. The Room of Requirements has a spatial limit, but she’s learned it’s easiest enough to create the illusion that one’s outside, and she did promise Kakashi she’d show him her hometown. She paces three times, destination in mind, and then pulls him through the door the moment it appears.

“This is the Room of Requirements,” she says as he spins around on the path, staring up at the long stretches of bamboo too thick to see through on either side of them, the leaves at the top spanning out above them to hide the ceiling. It’s warm here, as though she brought him in spring or summer or rather than winter, and more quiet than it ever would be in real life. “It can do _almost_ anything, and this is a pretty accurate imitation, so welcome to the Sagano Bamboo Forest where I regularly do my summer homework.”

“Room of Requirements?” he repeats. “How come I’ve never heard of this place? What is it?”

She explains what Naruto explained to her in their first year, hopping up to sit on the top rail of the fence lining the path. After a moment, he joins her, and waits a while after she finishes, just looking around at his surroundings, before saying, “You know, I didn’t just ask you to the ball because neither of us has a date.”

Downstairs, the Yule Ball is still two hours from ending, and she wonders how she’s going to explain her sudden disappearance to her friends tomorrow morning. “That’s good,” she says. “I didn’t just say yes because I needed a dance partner.”

There are no bird calls or multilingual tourists chattering to break the quiet pauses tonight. He kisses her, moving slow enough that she can back away if she’d like, and she lets him. When he pulls away, there’s a rare look of uncertainty across his face, so she tells him it’s all right, and kisses him again.

 

 

“Are you the two of you dating now?” Sakura says, sitting with Sasuke and Naruto on a bench by the frozen lake, surrounded by the Warming Spell Sasuke learned in Alaska years ago as they finish their holiday homework. “Merlin, you _can’t_ both have gotten dates before me.”

Sakura’s frowning, the pink lipgloss only a shade darker than her hair accenting the expression. On her right sits Naruto, whose nose is flushed red. Though Sasuke hadn’t wanted to discuss her dating life with either of them, or anyone, she knows it’s the sort of thing friends tell each other. “I don’t know if inviting me to Hogsmeade is really dating,” she says, “but we decided not to tell anyone. It’s just better if Beauxbatons and Durmstrang don’t think we’re conspiring.”

Skeptically, Sakura says, “Oh, yes, because keeping secrets is so terribly innocent,” before turning to Naruto. “And _you_. Hinata sleeps in the bed right next to me. I’m perfectly aware that she didn’t return to the dormitory last night.”

As Naruto’s cheeks redden, too, he says, “We just talked.”

“‘Talked?’” Sasuke says, quick to grasp onto the opportunity to move the conversation away from herself. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

He pulls his wool cap lower over his eyes, and Sakura unabashedly giggles. “Oh, _Naruto_ ,” she says. “I didn’t know that—what is it?”

In the distance, Moody and Snape stand side by side, clearly arguing. Moody seems to be enjoying the exchange, his expression not unlike the day in class when he tortured the garden snake, but Snape’s pale face is blotchy pink from anger and his frown pronounced. Though any argument between two professors in such a public setting should be interesting enough alone, what catches Sasuke’s attention is the way Moody’s hand keeps straying to the pocket she knows he keeps the flask in.

“It’s nothing,” she says, though her mind’s already skipped several steps into speculation and disconnections. “Anyway. How’re you planning on breaking the news to Neji?”

“There’s nothing to break!”

As Sakura says, “Sure there isn’t,” Sasuke glances back towards the school, and finds Moody gone, leaving Snape alone by the entrance steps in his black robe and black cloak with his black hair like a Halloween drawing of a crow. At times, Hogwarts feels like a place where battle lines are drawn, and few things bother Sasuke quite so much as the uncertainty of knowing where new faculty falls.

 

 

Though Sasuke doesn’t understand how Rita Skeeter learns of her potential relationship, the woman does, and on the same day classes begin again the cover article of _Witch Weekly_ reads, “Hogwarts Champions: Lovers, or Fellow Conspirators?”

“‘Fellow conspirators’ makes us sound like con-artists,” she says when she meets him in third floor corridor between Transfiguration and Arithmancy. “I like it.”

Kakashi shrugs, and behind him the steady stream of students slow just long enough to stare, like cars on a highway creating rubbernecking after an accident. “Karkaroff and Madame Maxime aren’t going to be happy,” he says, reading the article over her shoulder. “I doubt we’ll be getting all the points we deserve for now on.”

Rolling her eyes, Sasuke says, “Like we were already? So. Does this mean we can do Hogsmeade as a real date?”

“We might as well,” he says. “I never did like the idea of sneaking around.”

She smiles, and goes on her toes to kiss him once, openly, before heading off to class.

 

 

Sakura’s hair is the brightest spot in the lake, acting as a beacon for Sasuke to follow long before she ever sees the mermaids. The pole next to her is empty, the rope rising slowly to surface, and to her great annoyance, she realizes the two left are Hermione, who was Krum’s date to the ball, and some silver-haired little girl, which can only mean Kakashi reached here first. Newfound relationships are not nearly reason enough for Sasuke’s competitive streak to disappear, and she’s quick to pick up a sharp stone from the ground and cut her friend free.

As she loops her arm around Sakura’s waist and kicks off from the pole to carry them upwards, a few mermaids look over, but none try to stop them. It’s a struggle swimming back to the surface, Sasuke’s legs tangling with her friend’s more often than she expected. She wonders where Krum is, and Delacour, but doesn’t care particularly, and reaches the shore in forty five minutes. Professor Dumbledore and Bagman are both beaming; Crouch seems indifferent; Karkaroff and Maxime are frowning in full frosty force. Then Kakashi is rushing forward, that muted smile of his spread across his mouth as he reaches forward, and pulls Sasuke up.

Fluer, as it happens, is injured, and after Krum arrives just minutes after Sasuke, the mermaids return her little sister to her. The judges give Kakashi a higher score, but there’s no concrete reason to decrease Sasuke’s too much, so once her current one is combined with her much higher last one, they’re tied for first. “Well, would you look at that,” she says when the judges rattle off Fleur's, turning her attention to Kakashi. They’re sitting together on the dock wrapped in the blankets with Sakura next to her, Naruto fussing over them both like a worrying mother. “Even winning isn’t enough to beat me.”

“I thought girlfriends were supposed to be more supportive,” he says as behind him, Krum gently pulls a bug from Hermione’s hair.

“Supportive of the competition?” she says. “I wouldn’t dream of that.”

His mouth parts to answer, but she leans forward to kiss him before he can, uncaring of who sees.

 

 

Three days after the second task, Moody announces today’s lesson is the resisting Imperius Curse, and taught as a practical. “No,” Sasuke says without thinking of consequences when every eye draws to her first. “No, I’m not doing this.”

Her classmates are silent and staring, awaiting point reducing and detention. Instead of either of these, Moody’s normal eye simply narrows and he asks, “What do you plan on doing when a Dark wizard tries to curse you, Uchiha?”

“It’s a _curse_ ,” she says. “They aren’t impossible to dodge. I’ve already had one used on me, and I’m not looking to add to the list in a classroom, Professor.”

Voice dropping to low, he says, “I would have thought you of all people would understand the importance.”

“Well, I don’t.” She has his full attention, and therefore the focus of both his eyes, and as she did the day in his office, she accepts the challenge of meeting his gaze. “My Shield Charm deflected dragon fire, Professor. Do you want to see where a deflected Imperius Curse will go?”

The silence grows more potent, the air still with anticipation until he moves on to Kiba. Moody watches her with his one normal eye, and she truly doesn’t think even the most senile of ex-Aurors would act like this.

 

 

“Hogwarts is built on gossip,” Kakashi says days later when Sasuke sees him for first time all week. It’s a Saturday at noon, and despite the cold, the day is beautiful, and their stroll around the lake they so recently threw themselves into nice. “I heard about what happened in Defense Against the Dark Arts.”

Sasuke scowls, ducking her head to hide her mouth in her thick Gryffindor-colored scarf, gifted to her by Itachi in her first year. “Of course you have,” she mumbles, letting the fabric muffle the words. Then she sighs, and, louder, says, “He didn’t give me detention.”

With a shrug made audible by the rustle of his robes, Kakashi says, “Maybe he realized he was out of line. It doesn’t really make sense he’s showing fourth years anyway.”

“Excuse me?” While she doesn’t understand Moody’s reasoning much, either, it does sting to hear her boyfriend put so much emphasis on the age.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” he says so quickly that it’s exactly what he meant. “I just meant—well, there’s something off about him treating the fourth years differently even before your name was selected. Didn’t you say he’s been watching you all semester?”

When she told him, it was a casual complaint, because she’s so used to people thinking she’s just paranoid that she doesn’t comment on whether or not she trusts someone often. The last thing she wants is to be considered the Girl Who Cried Wolf. “Yeah,” she says. “And the thing is, I’ve heard a lot about Moody. My brother sort of hero worships him, and Minato worked under him a long time. If any professor were to not care about me, it would be him.”

“Dumbledore could have hired him just to keep an eye on you,” Kakashi says. “Having the Triwizard Tournament this year meant something had to go wrong.”

A gust of wind sweeps by, sluggishly swirling up melting snow around their ankles and over the lake. Sasuke says, “Sometimes I feel like I’m bait. Ever notice how often protection in Hogwarts seems to fail?”

Kakashi removes one gloved hand from his pocket, and wraps his arm around her shoulder, tucking her into his side. “What happened?”

After a short hesitation, she explains the day she confronted him in his office, describing the multi-locked chest and the flash and the Foe-Glass. “I know it sounds crazy,” she finishes, “but—”

“It doesn’t sound crazy,” he says. “I think anyone in Hogwarts could agree people are out to get you, and there’s more ways to do that than the Imperius Curse.”

“The flask could have Polyjuice Potion,” she says, because she’s been thinking about this for a long time already. “We’d know for certain if we got it away from him.”

“That won’t be easy.”

“I’ve done worse.”

It _does_ sound crazy, so he may not believe her, but she wants to make the preemptive strike for once her life, and isn’t about to turn down the help.

  
  


After much deliberation, Sasuke decides to tell Naruto and Sakura, who are expectedly insulted she didn’t come to them first, and just as expectedly offer to act as distractions.

Planning a theft from a professor who never rids himself of the object worth stealing is a delicate matter, and they use the restricted section of the library past curfew to do it. Before Sasuke can propose her idea, though, Sakura says, “I’m sorry for saying you were stressed when you brought it up the first time. After Quirrell and the Chamber of Secrets and your name coming out, I guess I was hoping someone was just inconsiderate for once, not evil.”

“Yeah,” Naruto says, “but then he wanted to put everyone under the Imperius Curse, and didn’t do anything big to like half my class. I actually like my house and even I know that’s weird.”

A draft brushes through the stacks and shelves, seeping through the glass windows at the other end of the library and curling under Sasuke’s pajamas. Her heart flutters, but she keeps her expression neutral, not wanting to appear as nervous as she is. “Good,” she says, folding her hands in her lap. “Kakashi’s checking tomorrow to see if this isn’t entirely useless—N.E.W.T. students have access to the Potions cupboard during class, and he knows what to look for.”

“And if they are missing?” Sakura says. “Then what?”

“I have an idea,” Sasuke answers. “Remember when we used the mirror in the Room of Requirements to spy on the dragons? If the room can do that, what if can also change where the door lets you out of?”

Sakura draws her eyebrows close in concern and says, “How are you going to use that to steal something off him? That eye can see everything.”

It’s the eye causing Sasuke problems, as she easily could’ve Summoned the flask away otherwise, and she frowns at the mention of it. “Honestly,” she says, “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Rolling his eyes, Naruto says, “You never do,” as though they don’t always come out all right in the end anyway. “Can’t you go after something else? Like the Foe-Glass? ‘Cause that’s just in his office.”

The Foe Glass would be useless to them, but she pauses before saying so, mind jumping to the next logical conclusion. “You’re right,” she says. “Not the Foe-Glass, but the chest. No one uses that many locks to guard clothes, and I know more Unlocking Spells than _Alohomora_.”

Even before her first year and the incident with Quirrell, Sasuke was always very focused on the idea of learning to protect herself. Knowing how to lock and unlock is important, as they’re good for hiding, and also beginner spells. While there’ll inevitably be protection against _Alohomora_ , _Gahikaru_ is considered a counter-jinx, not a charm, and requires different security spells. There’s no way to prove that without trying, but it seems likely enough.

“Don’t do it at night,” Sakura says. “For all we know he sleeps in there. I’ve got Defense Against the Dark Arts before lunch, and it’s wouldn’t be weird if I stopped to ask about whatever the lesson is. I’ll keep him in the classroom.”

“I can go into the Room of Requirements with you,” Naruto says as another draft drifts by. “Just because you can leave doesn’t mean you get back, right? So I can watch through the mirror or something and—”

Shaking her head, Sasuke says, “Don’t. We’ll need to keep other professors away too in case it takes time. You can do that better than anyone.”

With Sakura and Naruto on the outside, Kakashi will have to be on the inside to watch the mirror. It’s not the perfect plan, but the ones she has rarely ever are, and she ignores the prodding warning at the back of her mind telling her to stay away.

 

 

Sasuke charms the Sneakoscope to stillness when she enters Moody’s office during lunch, quieting the racket that might attract attention. Not far from the door, halfway down the corridor, lurks Naruto prepared to distract any unsuspecting professor while in the classroom, Sakura pesters Moody about test scores. Cheerful afternoon sunlight streams glowing through the uncovered windows, glinting off metallic equipment. Even with the evidence of paranoia scattered throughout the room, there’s an illusion of something far too safe.

The door to the Room of Requirements disappears as Sasuke takes the first step towards the multi-locked chest, cutting off her escape route until her boyfriend opens it again. Unlocking it takes longer than she likes, as each needs to be done individually, and the bang from down the corridor comes just as the last one clicks. She jumps, knocking her knee against latch, but doesn’t hesitate. There’s no one more likely to get himself simultaneously in trouble and out of it again than Naruto, she tells herself. It could be Dumbledore walking this way, or Moody himself, and she’d still have time.

As she pushes the unlocked compartments open, she finds a new assortment of objects in each one, and no trick bottom she can see or feel. The final one, though, opens to a seventh and final compartment with a ladder leading to space deeper than a grave. With a short glance at the door behind her, she pushes the other compartments closed, and enters, pulling the door closed as she does. When she needs to leave, Kakashi can open the door for her, and Moody never needs to know anyone was here at all.

A low groan comes from her feet as she lands on the ground, deep and familiar, and she startles again at the sound of it. “ _Lumos_ ,” she whispers into the darkness, and blinks rapidly as light blooms at the end of her wand, brilliantly bright and illuminating the bruised, broken figure propped against the far wall.

It’s Mad-Eye Moody, legless and eyeless, living and alone rather than the store of Snape’s potions’ ingredients as she and her friends expected. She’s too shocked to speak at the sight of him, falling back against the ladder so the rungs press into her spine. Bleary and squinting and equally shocked, the man across from her finds his voice first and says, “How the hell did you get in here, girl?” in a raspy version of the same growl she’s heard for months.

She steadies herself, moving her wand closer to her face. “I’m Itachi Uchiha’s little sister,” she says, confused as to _how_ and not _why_ could be his first question. “Oh—okay. What does it take to unbind you?”

There are so many questions in her head she needs to ask, and more than that, time to process this, but she doesn’t know how long she has, so she focuses on what she can do instead. As she nears, though, Moody recoils as much as his body allows. “He’s got my eye, Uchiha,” he says, staring up at her with his other one. “It can see through walls. _Leave_.”

Though she’d known the eye could see through more than she was comfortable with, some part of her thought the Hogwarts walls were too thick, or too enchanted for it. After all, there’s little reason otherwise that anyone would need so many Dark Detectors. Before she can ask Moody anything else, though, she hears the muffled sound of the office door opening, and realizes that Kakashi would’ve opened a door already if he could. Even the Room of Requirements has limits, and she doesn’t know how it hadn’t occurred to her earlier.

“Who is he?” she asks, listening to the uneven footsteps stop, and the imposter begin talking just loud enough for his voice to be heard. “I know names.”

The voice stops. Sasuke snuffs out her light. Moody says, “Kabuto York,” and the name alone sends a shock of cold skipping through her body.

As the lock clicks, she pivots, wand held at the ready. There’s a single moment of horrendous anticipation, and then the compartment door swings open.

“ _Everte Statum_!”

Kabuto flies backwards out of sight, red spell dying before it can connect with either her or Moody, but he reappears, crouched, when she’s only halfway up the ladder, an angry expression twisting his false scarred face. Silently, wordlessly, a deep purple flame comes from a wand so close to her chest that she has to physically dodge to get away. It hits the wall above Moody’s head, creating a crater that rains dust across his hair. With his ability to do nonverbal magic, Kabuto’s quicker than she is, but he’s still too surprised to move when she punches him in the nose with her free hand instead of trying to cast any herself.

Instinctively, he reels back, rocking on his heels. She seizes his moment of distraction, saying, “ _Depulso, wand_ ,” and directing it past her, right into Moody’s loosely opened hands.

She doesn’t pause to see what he does with it, hopping over the chest’s shallow edge to hand on floor, and finding to her annoyance that Kabuto already has his own wand back in hand. Though she doesn’t know much about wandlore, she understands there has to be some reason Kabuto was able to use another wizard’s wand so effectively, and was hoping he didn’t have his on him.

Behind him is the Foe-Glass, and in it are four figures growing larger, coming closer. “There’re ways to protect against intrusions,” he says, raising his wand, “ and Miss Harper is unconscious in the broom closet across from my office. I hope you weren’t expecting help.”

“ _Vladet_ ,” she says, satisfied with the way his body stiffens even as the knowledge of how badly she thought this through builds. “Now drop your wand.”

“What did you do?” he asks, suddenly on the receiving end of a fourteen-year-old’s mercy. Down in the compartment, she hears a shuffle, and Summons Kabuto’s wand. “Why can’t I—?”

With a flick of her wand, he flies across the room, knocking against the far wall, before she slips his into her pocket. “You can think of it as the Russian version of the Imperius Curse,” she says as she steps towards him, waving her wand again so he crumples to his knees. “Just it controls the body rather than mind. You’ve been my professor for a whole year, and seriously don’t know how good I am yet? Oh, I better get that flask off you. Toss it over.”

His face’s disconcertingly unreadable as he removes it from his pocket, and, as directed, throws it to her. She catches it easily, and just barely sees his smile before she feels the familiar tug at her navel dragging her away.

 

 

When she lands, portkey falling uselessly from her hand, she’s in a windowless room lit only by floating, dancing flames.

“I’d hoped to keep this meeting for the third task,” says Orochimaru from the dais at the head of the room, reclining in an undecorated, old armchair, “but you’ve forced my hand. Hello, Sasuke. It’s been in a while.”

Her heart beats so hard she thinks she can feel it through her entire body, but she straightens her posture, and takes inventory of the room for anything she can use. “Yeah, nine years is a long time to be obsessed with a schoolgirl,” she says, despairing in the single door behind him, and how the roundness of the ceiling and damp smell of dirt indicate they’re underground. “What’s the point? Annoyed you couldn’t kill my whole family at once? That you _still_ can’t seem to kill either of us? Really, I don’t know how you have any followers at all with a record like that.”

Though his hand twitches, he doesn’t move, nor change his expression. “Your family were followers of mine once,” he says, standing now, arms tucked behind his back, and for a moment she thinks she misheard him. “Or, at least that’s what I thought. They were good liars, your family—a trait you and your brother share. As it happens, they were reporting back to Dumbledore’s incompetent rebel group. They call themselves the Order of the Phoenix, an organization your brother’s part of. Ah. I thought you might not know that.”

She’s heard of the Order of the Phoenix vaguely in whispered mentions in the Northrop house, and she doesn’t appreciate that Orochimaru is making her hesitate. When she doesn’t answer, he continues, “I’ve sent my followers after the Auror office where your brother is currently handling paperwork. It only required five of us to kill your entire family. Just me to kill your cousin. How many will it take to kill your brother?”

“My cousin,” she repeats. “What did you do to Obito?”

Itachi might be doing paperwork, but there’s going to be at least two other Aurors in the office at the same time, and he’s been considered a prodigy since he entered school, so she isn’t as worried about him as she would be about anyone else. Obito, though, she’s always hoped was alive despite all logic pointing to the contrary, and hearing this reopens an old wound.

As he steps from the dias, Orochimaru says, “I don’t control my followers’ every move, and Bellatrix doesn’t like Mudbloods much. I think Miss Nowell is still St. Mungo’s. Oh, you didn’t know about that, either? Well, regardless, he didn’t appreciate the letter I sent saying she asking for him, but I thought if I used the Imperius Curse he’d bring the two of you to me. When it didn’t work, I killed him. I couldn’t have him telling Dumbledore.”

“So, while you’ve proved you’re the type of person to laugh while killing puppies,” she says, meeting his yellow, snake-slitted eyes when he sets them on her, “you still haven’t explained why you want to kill me.”

“It was a point of pride when you were young,” he answers. “But you’re much more use to me alive. Tell me, do you think you’re more skilled than your cousin?”

In the same moment he casts a Stunning Spell, she says, “ _Finite Incantatem_ ,” and follows it with “ _Zenyami_ ,” before he can recast the floating lights.

She keeps very still, listening intently to aim properly in the darkness. It’s complete and impenetrable, as the name implies, and neither of them will be able to see each other’s spells. Knowing she needs to move eventually, she drops her cloak, her noisiest garment, to the ground, and dodges so the spell she feels rather than sees passes her by. Twice more she does this, toeing off her shoes to minimize the sound she might make, and then stills again, waiting.

From all around her rather than one central point, like an announcer at a Quidditch match, Orochimaru’s voice says, “Very good, Sasuke. Your parents might have lived had they been this creative.”

There’s a low hiss in his words, like a snake but unlike a cloak brushing against a stone floor, which she hears to the right of her. She tracks the sound, wand outheld, and waits until it stops. A Stunning Spell of her own presses against her lips, but she loses her opportunity to cast it when his spell hits her first.

It’s not the Imperius Curse as she thought, but a simple _Expelliarmus_ , striking her wrist and ricocheting her wand into the darkness. Her spell dissipates all at once, returning light to the room, revealing Orochimaru so close she can see the chapped cracks in his lips and the layers of colors in his eyes. Another spell comes towards her, but she misses what it is, anticipating it and evading without waiting. Then the same spell Kabuto tried to cast earlier finds its mark in her chest, passing through her, cutting into her lungs. Suddenly, breathing becomes something hard and wet, and when she coughs, blood pools up from her chest into her throat, into her mouth, spilling out of her and into her hand. The sight of it is dizzying, but she’s no less aware of Orochimaru stepping near enough to touch.

He says something, but she doesn’t hear it, remembering that she has Kabuto’s wand, a fact that Orochimaru doesn’t know. As he again raises his wand, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out his follower’s.

“ _Imperio_!”

“ _Avada Kedavra_!”

In the moment before the spell hits, Orochimaru’s eyes widen, and she wonders if he’s thinking too of Mikoto Uchiha bleeding out in the snow, willing to kill to save her children, or if he’s just surprised a Gryffindor even dared. He crumbles like that, shocked in death, with the same gracelessness as Mom, or Dad, or Obito, or any of the unknown others this same wand has killed. It happens so fast she can barely believe it, but the second bout of coughing is a harsh reminder the fight wasn’t without consequence.

Even with Orochimaru dead, though, the Death Eaters will be after Itachi, and she can tell stop them if she gets back. “ _Accio, flask_ ,” she says, and just the effort of having to catch it is enough to bring her to the ground.

She blinks blearily, eyes unfocused, as she coughs again, blood falling across her chest and arms. Before enchanting the portkey, she says, “ _Accio, wand_ ,” and both hers and Orochimaru’s roll to her feet. As she raises hers to create the portkey, she stops, realizing even through her pained fog that the reasoning of “self-defense” won’t be enough to release her from a charge of using an illegal curse, and she has no excuse. “ _Reducto_ ,” she says to Kabuto’s wand so it explodes across her lap. Then she lifts Orochimaru’s wand, acknowledging only vaguely that her hand is shaking, and repeats, “ _Avada Kedavra_.”

Green fire shoots from the wand, fluttering out at a point barely past its creation, but what matters it that it’ll appear when she says the spell simply backfired. When that’s over, she rolls it back towards him, casts the same Shielding Charm she used in the first task, and enchants the flask. The pull of portkey sucks what air she had left from her lungs, and she loses consciousness too soon to warn anyone.

 

 

Recovery is painful, done in St. Mungo’s rather than Hogwarts, and under the guard of Aurors. “You don’t have to finish up the semester,” Itachi says on Sasuke’s first day awake, stroking her hair, here as guardian and guest simultaneously. “The school acknowledges you’re skilled enough that you can move ahead a year without it.”

Though she wants to ask him about the Order of the Phoenix, about whether it’s true and why he’s never told her, the words don’t form. It would be too hypocritical to accuse him of lying when she’s lied to him about something much worse. She can’t seem to tell him, either, about Obito, and the lonely woman that might still be on the fifth floor of this same hospital. Instead, she just nods, and curls up tighter beneath the blankets.

“Can you take a holiday?” she asks quietly, knowing she should be asking about her friends and Kakashi, but lacking the energy to. She _killed_ someone, well deserved or not, and covered it up. “I don’t think I want to be in England for a while.”

He smiles, closed-lip and shamed as though this were somehow his fault. “I was already planning to,” he says. “We can leave once the healers say you’re all right.”

Again, she nods, and says, “I’m tired,” because it’s true, and she needs him to leave before she says anything she regrets.

“Okay,” he says, and stands. “I’ll be right outside the door.”

Before leaving, he kisses her forehead as though she were still a little girl ready to hear a fairy tale to send her off to sleep.

 

 

As Sasuke thought might happen, an Auror who wasn’t either Minato or Itachi searched both her wand, and Orochimaru’s retrieved one, to see the truth behind her story. When Rita Skeeter’s article comes out, Sasuke’s not terribly surprised, and spends the day after wandering the hospital trying to get the headline “The Girl Who Lived” out of her head.

She finds the real Moody like this, in a private room on the same floor at the end of the same corridor, and he explains how Kakashi lead Dumbledore and McGonagall to the office. “He’s been sent to Azkaban,” Moody says, perfectly patient with the girl perched on the chair at his bedside. The room’s sterile white, crisp clean but ragged at the edges of the drapes and blankets where gazes aren’t meant to linger. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he was given the Kiss already.”

“I hear the Aurors talking sometimes,” she says, trying not to think that she wishes she’d had a longer time with Kabuto first. Catching him in the Possession Curse was satisfying in a way it shouldn’t have been. “He isn’t the only Death Eater who’s been caught already. Probably wasn’t even the easiest.”

“They’ll never catch all of them,” Moody says. “A lot of witches and wizards will use the Imperius Curse as an excuse, and some might even be telling the truth. But that’s the Ministry’s problem now.”

“And the Order of the Phoenix,” she says without thinking, and his wandering magical eye joins his normal one in focusing on her as they would in the classroom. Raising an eyebrow, she says, “What? Like I’m wrong?”

With a rueful expression, he says, “Should’ve known he’d bring it up. What did he tell you?”

This is a conversation she should be having with Itachi, not a man who spent several months locked in a chest. “That it was Dumbledore’s organization resisting him,” she says, leaning back in the chair. “That my parents spied for them, and that Itachi’s working for them now.”

“That’s true,” he says, “and if you hadn’t killed him, you would’ve been involved before you turned seventeen.”

She stares at him, and keeps her grip relaxed at the edges of the chair. “I didn’t kill him,” she says. “Ask any Auror.”

“No,” Moody says, unconvinced. “I’d believe that from your brother if it were him, but you don’t learn something like the Possession Curse if you don’t intend to use it.”

While he’s right, she isn’t willing to admit it to herself, or anyone else. “I’m a quick study.”

He laughs, a short bark that turns into a wheeze, and says, “I think I would’ve liked you as a student, Uchiha.” Then, more serious, he adds, “Become a professor when you graduate, or a Curse Breaker. Stay away from the Aurors.”

“It’s not like I liked it,” she says, defensive, because she hears the implication clearly. “He was casting the Imperius Curse, and I needed to warn who I could, and I was already spitting blood. I wouldn’t have done it if I had any other choice. Considering how often his followers’ve proven what they’re capable of, it seemed better than risking it.”

Though she thinks of Konan and Nagato as family, she knows she realistically wouldn’t survive losing Itachi in a way that doesn’t extend to anyone else. More than that, she’s forced herself to reason since waking, people have wanted him dead for years, and she had an opening. It wouldn’t have been right not to take it.

She readies herself for reparation, or maybe even a warning that Moody’s going to tell Minato, but he reacts almost blandly. “Spoken like a true Gryffindor,” he says, and she remembers something Orochimaru’s follower said in her second year, about how Gryffindors would damn their souls and their friends’ if it meant doing the right thing for the greater good.

“Yeah,” she says, equally bland, and stands. “I leave for Japan tomorrow. Will you be a professor again next year? You never technically filled your promise to Professor Dumbledore.”

With a light shrug, Moody answers, “Retirement’s more boring than people say,” which might mean yes, and might also turn into a no.

After their talk, there’s more she could say, but she only wishes him goodbye, and slips away. Tomorrow she’s going home, and has never felt so relieved.

 

 

“We’ll write to you,” Sakura says early the next morning when she and Naruto visit with special permission to leave the school for a few hours. To Sasuke’s disappointment, Kakashi couldn’t come, held back by N.E.W.T.s and the tournament they haven’t discontinued. “I expect answers.”

She nods, and glances past them to Itachi, who’s thumbing through the _Daily Prophet_ while pretending not to pay attention. “I will,” she says, and accepts Naruto’s all encompassing hug.

Though he hasn’t lost anyone, she thinks he probably understands more than any of their friends after so many overheard conversations between his parents, and hugs him as tightly as he hugs her. “I’m willing to get a portkey and go all the way to Japan if you don’t,” he says into her hair as Sakura, for once, hangs back. “That’s a promise.”

Again she nods, knowing that his parents would let him, too, and moves away, accepting Sakura’s shorter hug, too. “I’ll be back next year,” she says with a frown, looking again to the two of them. Their hair, both so bright on normal days, seem dull in comparison to the apathetic hospital light. “Stop making it sound like I’m leaving forever.”

It’s not until after the words come out that she realizes they were a command rather than a request, which is irrationally disturbing after her talk yesterday. Her friends, though, are too used to this to notice, and brush it off as though it were nothing, conversation as aimless as thoughts buzzing through the quiet room.

 

 

A few days before her birthday and nearly two months after returning home, Kakashi appears like a surprise present. They spend a week with her family before she does as promised, and steals him away.

Because it feels right, she leads him deep into the Sagano bamboo stalks, away from the Muggles clogging the stone path to the smaller, unknown shrines hidden by moss and decay. It’s ancient and quiet, and peaceful, too. Kakashi leans back against a rock, looking to the stone houses rather than to her. “You haven’t written in a while,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if it was all right coming, but I start work in a week.”

In his first letter, he said he received a job in the Auror office, offered to him before he even applied despite never taking Charms in his seventh year. Sometimes being smart backfires. “No,” she says, wrapping her arms loosely around her knees. It’s hot, her hair frizzing in the heat with the air thick with humidity. “I’m glad you did. I just wasn’t expecting it.”

Kakashi breathes deep, taking in the sugar sweet smell of summer, too. “I would’ve left if I was allowed,” he says, as he did on his first day here and in his first letter. “I’m sorry.”

“Flitwick would’ve dragged you back by your hair if you even tried, and I wasn’t exactly allowed visitors,” she says. “I get it. Tests that determine your future are more important than tournaments or other relatively uninjured students.”

“Even professors know you’re my girlfriend.”

Glancing to his face now, she says, “So we’re still dating?”

“We stopped?”

Dating should be the least of her worries, but she’s still a teenager returning to school in September, which is a part of herself even a few revealed lies and a murder can’t change. “I didn’t think you’d want to,” she says. “You’ve graduated. You’re eighteen.”

Finally, Kakashi looks to her, too, and the sunlight filtering through the bamboo canopy turns his pale blonde hair grey. He’s frowning, mouth creased at the edges. “Three years isn’t that far apart,” he says, “ and we’re not the only ones. If you want to break it off, though, that’s all right. I can make a portkey.”

“No,” she says again. “I’m pretty sure I like you enough not to.”

His frown twists, the corners of his mouth flicking upwards. “Good,” he says, but shoulders hunching in. “I like you, too.”

It’s childish, too like the one fumbling kiss she shared with Harry by the Shrieking Shack during their first Hogsmeade visit, but this hasn’t been a relationship progressed yet to declarations of love and loyalty. Maybe she’s getting there, though, because she survived the death of her family and a Cruciatus Curse at five, and she’s been skilled in adaptability long before it was reasonable. Kakashi has been, too, with his deadpan tone and blank expressions, and when he leans in to kiss her with more confidence than a boy of thirteen, she reciprocates as though they were nothing short of normal.

The feeling is simple, and for now, enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! I'm DONE! Seriously, you don't know how annoying this year's been so far, but it's been hell, and I know this isn't the best, but cut me some slack, okay? I've been writing it in incriminates of twelve and two in between researching. Thesis will be the death of me before the year is up.

**Author's Note:**

> Did I forget to mention this was chaptered? Because it's chaptered. Sorry about that, guys. 
> 
> Oh, and I apologize for the last line. I honestly couldn't think of anything.
> 
> Again, edit: a new scene was added to the end.


End file.
